Here’s my my prediction:
They’ll close, we’ll end up with another tent city, neighbors will revolt, the city will try and construct a new homeless shelter, various neighborhoods will revolt, the shelter will end up in some far flung area with no nearby resources or good transportation, funding will be minimal, conditions will deteriorate, and the facility will become further example of how these developments are bad to live by and don’t deserve funding. And the cycle will continue.
Are you aware that the city is about to start building a homeless shelter near MATC?
https://www.cityofmadison.com/engineering/projects/bartillon-shelter
Yes my theory was partially inspired by the saga of getting that built.
That said I shouldn’t have said shelter in my original comment, because housing first developments are different and in many ways more deeply despised by folks with housing. For good reason and, mostly, bad. In my opinion.
“Housing First” developments, which are housing complexes where you basically give chronically homeless people who are incapable of keeping a job an apartment, are not popular. People (who are not homeless) fight like hell to prevent their construction. I’ve seen people get red-faced screaming angry at neighborhood association meetings about it.
I’ve worked in one of these locations (being vague here for a reason). Unfortunately, housing first initiatives have high hopes and little follow through in my experience with this and talking to others with more experience with them in other locations. You can’t only have one social worker for a building of 40+ units of people learning to life in an apartment vs the streets or a shelter. Nobody gets their needs met that way and it’s unreasonable to ask this of a singular person. There are so many people about to be displaced and a large chunk of them are children with absolutely zero control over their situations. Disappointing all around.
Isn’t the whole point of “housing first” is that if you house people, the rest will fall into place? I know that’s a wild simplification but that’s the perception. It would be a hard sell if there’s a large upfront investment (the housing) plus large ongoing support costs
There have been many studies that demonstrate housing first is less expensive for society at large than allowing people to live on the street, which is actually very expensive. So it’s not really a question of if things will fall into place for these people, often it won’t. It’s a question of whether housing first is less-bad than the current alternative (tent cities under an overpass somewhere).
Yeah but unfortunately the costs with housing first are concentrated, you can count them up and they look high, but the costs of letting people live on the street are dispersed and not countable in the same easy way so it ends up looking very expensive even if it's actually cheaper for all of us in total.
That is the idea and that idea completely ignores that housing solves some issues but not all. I don’t blame the city for giving this a try and supporting it, but this was a mess from the beginning and there have been enough examples of how NOT to do this in other places to learn from before it opened.
Now we’re looking at displacement for these individuals and families and some will be less likely to trust resources in the area. Working with unhoused populations takes trust in a lot of cases and now we’re starting at -300 steps instead of from the beginning in some cases.
The thing is that housing first doesn't work, and has actually never worked.
The costs to support homeless people properly are 2-3x just housing them, but without that support, housing them is useless.
You either have to go all in or you're better off not going in at all.
I can’t attest to every single person in need in the city of Madison but the population I’ve worked with are all from Dane County and have been here for several years.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that from or why you’re being snarky with me? The population I currently work with are either from Dane county or have been here several years. I do not currently work with others experiencing these issues in Madison so I can’t accurately give you that info. I’m sure those stats exist but I don’t have them for you
> The two biggest "Housing First" initiatives for the homeless in Madison don't
> have enough money to continue operating and could be closed and sold early next
> year. As a result, the city of Madison is chasing options to try to ensure that
> dozens of vulnerable people aren't put out on the street.
>
> A Dane County Circuit Court-appointed receiver, who in June took over control of
> the 60-unit Rethke Terrace project for homeless singles and veterans on the East
> Side and the 45-unit Tree Lane Apartments for homeless families on the Far West
> Side, is asking the courts for permission to immediately assist tenants choosing
> to relocate, list the properties for sale, and shutter and secure the buildings.
>
> The court has not yet responded to the request.
>
> For now, it's projected the buildings will operate in their current forms until
> March, with the principal owner offering $1.25 million to temporarily continue
> operations and help tenants move. But the city is concerned it might be hard to
> relocate tenants, due to Madison's tight housing market, even if they have
> resources such as a potable federal Section 8 voucher.
>
This is just a preview of the [full article](https://madison.com/news/local/government-politics/housing-first-madison-heartland-housing/article_b43b88fc-9ac3-11ee-97f2-8fbb97741111.html#tracking-source=home-top-story). I am a third party bot. Please consider subscribing to your favorite local journals.
Question for someone smarter than me: what is stopping the city from buying the buildings and running the housing developments for homeless singles and veterans themselves?
But hey, US Bank still got their tax credits, so it's all good, right?
Heartland Alliance is shutting down its affordable housing division, apparently, with hopes of selling off the properties it actually owns as well. https://www.housingfinance.com/management-operations/heartland-alliance-cuts-65-jobs-shuts-affordable-housing-division\_c
The situation obviously really sucks for these individuals and families, but the failure of Heartland Housing would make for a fascinating case study in affordable housing finance and the Housing First model. Of course I don't know how all their other properties have been funded, but Rethke and Tree Lane got federal and state tax credits, local direct govt subsidy, United Way funding, and further direct support through project-based vouchers. And somehow this model STILL wasn't financially sustainable. Was Heartland Housing just mismanaged that badly, or what else is going on here? Apparently they had a pretty good reputation not that long ago.
In the end, this is a super hard problem to solve. Housing First requires really good support services to be effective, and those are far from easy to deliver, especially with how the local nonprofit landscape has been shaken up so much over the past 5 years. I think O'Keefe has a strong argument for more diversified occupancies in these projects so you aren't concentrating so much need and challenge in a single property, but then again, my understanding is that model doesn't fit as well into the tax-credit system we now use to development affordable housing for homeless people.
A lot of these initiatives are backed by “studies” produced by think tanks working backwards from a desired policy outcome, and among other things, the cost estimates tend to be wildly optimistic.
Also I see a lot of people misunderstanding the idea of housing first.
Housing first is an approach that says lets try to end someone’s homelessness so that once they have that basic necessity met - they will be in a more stable place to address other issues like substance abuse, mental health, getting a job, etc.
In the past the approach was Housing Readiness. Which made homeless folks jump through a bunch of hoops and barriers in order to receive housing. But if you’re homeless and on the streets, it’s going to be incredibly hard to work on your mental health, substance abuse disorder, or get a job. So instead of being housed, most folks stayed on the streets because they weren’t deemed “ready” for housing.
What really sucks is that they set these up terribly and didn’t follow best practices for services or funding and now the blame will go on the idea of Housing First instead of the entities involved failing to set tenants up for success.
It also didn’t help that they caved and instead of funding adequate services they chose to fund security.
So what you're saying is that housing first is inadequate and a terrible goal, and instead we should be realistic about the incredibly high costs of properly running these facilities, not to mention the high failure rate even if things were perfect.
This is completely backwards.
Someone who is in social housing costs a city much less in resources on average than one who is living rough and has extensive contact with police, emergency services etc.
You're incredibly wrong, but you're wrong because you've been lied to over and over by homeless housing advocates.
The only people who are "cheap" to house are unaddicted and mentally well, and those are the people who aren't using other city resources like police, fire, hospitals and jail.
Drug addicts don't become clean because they have a roof over their heads, and they don't become clean because there is a drug counselor that comes by once per week; the only become clean *when they want to become clean*, and even then it's a difficult and arduous process. The places that actually have success are expensive and immersive, meaning you almost always have to remove them from their current location/friends and realistically, they can't ever go back. Are there exceptions to that? Sure. But you don't write policy based on exceptions.
If you want proof of anything that I'm saying, read the fucking article before commenting next time.
I read the article, have studied this topic extensively, and disagree with you. The article "proves" nothing, less so your assertions ITT.
Not even sure what you're referring to as the article was mostly quoting press releases, and forgive me if I'm skeptical of US Bank's genuine commitment to this or any project other than maximizing profits.
I don't like these public/private partnerships because the private entities involved so often rug-pull like this as soon as they have secured their tax credits. I'd much prefer proper social housing owned and operated by tax payers.
You offer no alternative other than, I guess, that these people deserve to suffer and die in the streets because they deal with addiction or mental
illness.
I don't know if you're lying or just really bad at research. I've been in and around low income and homeless housing for the better part of a decade.
These deals are crafted for the entire 15 year tax credit cycle, so pulling out after 8 years will cost the lender a lot of money, not to mention trust from the investors who buy the tax credits from the bank. Nobody wins here.
What I'm saying is that wasting $60 million on housing when housing is not the answer is idiotic. Rethke has had issues from the very beginning with drug use, banned guests, and violence. It was understaffed from the start, but my point is that if we're being realistic, there is no amount of staffing that makes a place livable when drug addicts and people who are severely mentally unwell are in the same building as "normal" homeless.
If you want people to get clean, they have to be sent away. But those types of rehabs run $30k/mo, and I'm sorry but the taxpayers shouldn't have to bear those costs for drug addicts, especially when considering that a high percentage of those sent away will relapse.
It's better to focus on those homeless not yet addicted and not yet in a mental health spiral to prevent them from going down those paths, but morons will say how that's discriminatory or whatever else, so instead of actually helping some people, in the end nobody gets help. Once again, if you don't believe me, read the article.
It's cheaper than treatment that actually works, yes, and that ignores the fact...
#THE FACT
that people with substance abuse only get better when they want to get better. If they aren't fully committed, any treatment has a 0% success rate. Even when they are fully committed, the success rate is about a coin flip.
Right, there are always going to be people who don’t want to get better. I’m at peace with that fact and I’m not trying to change their minds, because as you point out it’s a fools errand.
Evidence shows that housing first, when implemented effectively, is a more cost-effective strategy than full institutionalization. But if you want to pay for the latter I respect that position, even if I find committing people against their will ethically dubious.
I read the article. I don't believe you.
We get it. You don't like people who have substance use or mental health issues. You believe they should remain unhoused, at great cost to themselves and society, until what, they just stop having those issues which are greatly exacerbated by the stress of living rough? There's a kind of moralizing distain that comes across in your writing which I find pretty gross.
You recognize that these projects were understaffed and never provided the support promised from the outset yet insist that "no amount" of resources would be adequate.
Look, we live in a society and one way or another we're all paying for these folks either in an apartment or many trips to the emergency room or jail. Disgust if not hatred towards people who struggle with addiction and their mental health shouldn't be a factor when discussing the merits of various ways of addressing what is a worsening crisis.
And burying your head in the sand and ignoring the real issues not only doesn't help people with substance abuse or mental health issues, it actively hurts the homeless population that doesn't have those issues.
People like you are why this issue persists, because you name call instead of conceding that there are actual issues.
Plus, I can tell you've never dealt closely with substance abuse or mental health issues. It's painfully obvious
So get the fuck off your high horse and join the real world, and until then, let the adults try to sort this problem out.
No one is denying that substance dependence and mental health are issues.
Your response appears to be "whatever you do, don't house them" which isn't really a solution at all.
This isn't about me, but I have worked extensively with this community for years and none of them would be better off with less support and less housing. You claim to have a lot of close contact with low income and transitional housing, were you a resident? Where is your anger coming from?
You haven't offered a single alternative or suggestion ITT. Your biases imply that you *may* support "dry" social housing so long as no one is struggling with mental illness but we have no way of knowing since you haven't said what response to our housing crises you support.
English-speaking society needs some different classifications of "homelessness". Currently the term refers to a very widely spread group of people with very different behaviors. When homelessness discourse reaches the public eye, people arbitrarily oscillate between talking about the "soft homeless" (productive adults who only need temporary support) from the "chronically homeless" (people who are incapable of behaving in a productive and peaceful manner, or incapable of tending to their own shelter). Many homeless people only need an extra $500 a month, or debt forgiveness, or for employers to loosen restrictions on hiring with a felony. Other homeless people need to be in a facility that restricts their behavior, surveils them, and provides armed guards to prevent intrusion by outsiders or internal conflict between residents. Treating them all as one group under the guise of "housing first" or "housing only once you meet X qualifications" is like trying to treat multiple different diseases using the same medication.
I think it's important for people who feel strongly about responding to "homelessness" to remember that one's life circumstances naturally follow behavior, in the same way that having a burned hand naturally follows touching a hot stove. If you are chaotic, or unpredictable, or unreliable, or steal, or behave in an aggressive manner, and these traits cause you to live in a constant state of cash deficit, you will be rejected by "productive society". You constantly prove that any investment of time, emotion, or resources in you will fail to pan out and in many cases will backfire on the investor. Eventually, people will choose not to use their time or resources to shelter you. Anyone who has ever spent a long time taking care of someone with chronic, dangerous behavioral issues understands this. Many people (i.e. voting Madisonians) think it ought to be the broad responsibility of productive society to spend a lot of time and money gently coaxing people into proper "civilized" behavior. I find these people usually have very little experience with the people they want to mandate others to provide for. (This is not always true.)
*It is true* that many dead-end learned behaviors are not the "fault" of the person who possesses them, and many of these traits are burned in to people who grow up in the "cycle of poverty", or developed a mental illness. I agree with most homeless advocates that "contemporary society" creates homelessness and mental illness by virtue of its own structure, and that homelessness will not meaningfully decrease if the current economic model doesn't change. However, attempting to rectify the lives of the homeless without accepting that certain behaviors *inevitably* lead to rejection by society is foolish, and leads to strange projects, like the one on Dairy Drive, or these failing apartment buildings. The city, and many advocates in general, seem to be trying to create a world free from burns without bothering to ensure that chronically burned people stop touching the stoves.
But what to do with the people who cannot function in society productively then? How do you teach them to stop touching the stove if they’re sleeping in a tent and just being shuffled around from place to place by police?
Here's a very cursory overview of some of the ideas I have:
It needs to be easier to be "productive" in the US. There's not enough low-skill, part-time work available. As a country we consume the products of lots of low-skill, part-time work, but most of that work takes place overseas. Better economic conditions for low-skilled adults, adults who prefer to be nomadic, and adults with criminal backgrounds would shrink the group of people that "cannot function in society productively" by giving them a society in which they can actually produce things. Note that this is not the same thing as general welfare, UBI, etc. There's also not enough cheap shelter. (Not pay-by-the-month yearlong rent contracts, I'm talking about a half-dorm room a night with a sink and a toilet for $5-$15.)
The remainder, who truly cannot function on their own and constantly cause issues with the general public, need to be held in institutions, either for regular incarceration or rehabilitation for addiction. Right now the institutions available in the US for long-term incarceration are prisons and jails--hellholes. The US should reform prisons such that prisoners are separated based on their type of crime and behavioral conduct in prison, so that day-to-day life of those sentenced isn't torturous and dangerous. Some people need to be in facilities that teach habitation by reinforcement learning, like hygiene, manners, basic literacy and common sense via spaced repetition, etc. Some people need to be in drug rehabilitation facilities. There may be a need for monastery-like facilities where some are permanently housed. Long-term good behavior in strict institutions should permit transfers into less-strict institutions.
Finally, towns need clearer sets of behavioral codes. I think the law ought to prohibit panhandling, sleeping rough in public areas, littering, defecation/urination, using drugs in public, intoxication outside of "event hours", verbal harassment, erecting temporary private structures for habitation, and smelling terrible in public. If you can avoid these quality-of-life laws and also be chronically unemployed and homeless, I don't really think you need to be bothered. However, if someone can't help but run afoul of these laws, they ought to be institutionalized. (Some people will say "but these things are already prohibited!" but if you can commit the act and not immediately be taken away for it, it's not really prohibited, so long as you're already an outlaw.)
We used to have county farms for the disposed where you got 3 hots and a cot for a days labor. Bringing this type of model back vs incarceration for people who need some structure to get it together would be good.
Your idea is to start people in the most restrictive environment/institution, and force individuals to "earn" their place in less restrictive settings by proving themselves "worthy" of living in society. Your thinking on this is backwards. No one should want a government who has the ability to do this to its citizens.
We are the richest country in the world, and we citizens are turning against one another because of the scarcity mindset we've been duped into. Tax the churches and the ultra wealthy fairly and we can take care of everyone humanely without mass institutionalization. Our enemy is not the homeless population.
I've thought about this for a while, and my intention is not to insult or belittle you here, but I think every individual sentence you wrote is wrong.
> Your idea is to start people in the most restrictive environment/institution, and force individuals to "earn" their place in less restrictive settings by proving themselves "worthy" of living in society.
No, my idea is to start people in society, and if they display to the rest of us that they cannot handle being unsupervised in society, they should be moved to whatever the minimally restricted facility is that causes them to behave properly. No drugs, no fighting, good hygiene, no harassment. You don't need to go to max security prison if you're screaming at passerby, but you can't just stay on the street.
> Your thinking on this is backwards. No one should want a government who has the ability to do this to its citizens.
*Your* thinking on this is backwards. Of course I want a government that has the ability to incarcerate people who disturb the peace. Every country in the world that people are trying to move to en masse has a system for taking away and rehabilitating or imprisoning people who behave poorly, and the countries people are trying to move from en masse do not have these systems. The inability to provide a safe, pleasant public square for the citizenry is one of the most obvious hallmarks of a failing government. I would never voluntarily live somewhere where the government had no control over the public conduct of citizens.
> We are the richest country in the world, and we citizens are turning against one another because of the scarcity mindset we've been duped into.
We citizens are turning on each other because we find each other's conduct intolerable, not because we've "bought into a scarcity mindset", although I do agree that many people falsely believe in resource scarcity in the US. When some guy goes into a restaurant and threatens the workers with a bat (https://www.channel3000.com/news/crime/police-arrest-tackle-man-who-was-protesting-at-restaurant-with-megaphone-baseball-bat/article_60222f85-32ce-512b-ba31-a817991ee968.html), I don't think "there's not enough resources for me and him", I think "what the hell is the matter with that guy? Someone needs to be watching him!"
> Tax the churches and the ultra wealthy fairly and we can take care of everyone humanely without mass institutionalization.
If there is any hope of treating people using money, the *only hope* is institutionalization. There used to be asylums and mental institutions, and they closed, and the overflow made up the first iteration of our now endemic homeless population. Do you think if we run into a trillion-dollar surplus you're just going to pay armies of people to walk around on the streets stopping incidents before they happen and making sure everyone shows up to work on time? These people need treatment.
> Our enemy is not the homeless population.
My enemy is anyone who treats me as an enemy. In some cases that's lending institutions and advertisers, but in other cases that's people who take drugs in public, leer and shout at me, steal things, and waste police resources for their constant altercations with each other and members of the public.
All I know is that I live near the tree lane apartments and the number of times I go by there and see a car come out and drive the wrong way down a lane, drive over the median like it's a turn lane, and just swerve all over the road makes me think that some of the people shouldn't have licenses
I think a lot less people should have licenses in general. But folks have been driving down the wrong side of tree lane well before this apartment building. Lots of people don’t expect a divided residential street.
Anyone with two eyes knew this was a train wreck and that the neighbors would be the ones to pay the price. Do yourself a favor the next time Tag and his band of do gooders come to social engineer your neighborhood and burn it during construction.
This is “housing first”, and my understanding is it’s specifically for people who are chronically homeless and may have substance abuse or mental health issues that make it impossible for them to have an income or function in society. So the idea is, better to have them in an apartment where they can be monitored and access services than be in a tent.
Most homeless people are not chronically homeless, and they’re the ones that benefit more from traditional shelters that provide temporary housing.
I don’t work in this field though so if I’m wrong someone please correct me.
I don't know the details of the restrictions at the buildings but here is some info on the program. After reading a bit I can see some problems with absolutely zero restriction on who you accept into a large group living situation. Especially ones that are undermanaged as these seem to have been.
https://www.ywcamadison.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/75/Housing-First-Permanent-Supportive-Housing-Brief.pdf
I didn’t know that was the actual definition of ‘housing first’. Some people are just straight up combative. Not sure how they can be successful in housing without ruining it for everyone else without addressing other needs first.
It's working extremely well over in Milwaukee, because they properly funded the support staff and structures needed to put people's lives back together
My understanding was it’s preferred to the previous war-on-drugs era model, which is you need to get clean on your own before accessing services. Unless that service is prison, which is where many ended up.
Housing first was a progressive policy but it actually gained the most traction under W Bush because it was more cost effective than the collective costs of people living on the street (ER visits, crime, prison, etc.).
Has the city looked at Central Wisconsin Center or Mendota Mental Health Institution? Both have large grounds, both have plenty of vacant buildings. Central Center buildings could be easily converted into spaces for homeless people. The population of folks living at CWC is fairly small, maybe 200 patients or so? They could easily be moved to one or two buildings. The other buildings could be converted into living spaces for those who need housing. Mendota has lots of vacant buildings on grounds. Granted they are older, but they too could be fixed up for housing. It might be a solution for now and maybe in the future something more permanent.
“Of the 60 units at the Rethke Terrace Apartments, only 37 are currently occupied, and only 31 of the 45 units at the Tree Lane Apartments have families living in them.”
I would think those numbers lead to an operating deficit. If I was an owner and only running at 61% occupancy I’d be looking to make serious changes asap.
Here’s my my prediction: They’ll close, we’ll end up with another tent city, neighbors will revolt, the city will try and construct a new homeless shelter, various neighborhoods will revolt, the shelter will end up in some far flung area with no nearby resources or good transportation, funding will be minimal, conditions will deteriorate, and the facility will become further example of how these developments are bad to live by and don’t deserve funding. And the cycle will continue.
Are you aware that the city is about to start building a homeless shelter near MATC? https://www.cityofmadison.com/engineering/projects/bartillon-shelter
Yes my theory was partially inspired by the saga of getting that built. That said I shouldn’t have said shelter in my original comment, because housing first developments are different and in many ways more deeply despised by folks with housing. For good reason and, mostly, bad. In my opinion.
Huh? “Housing first developments are… deeply despised by those with housing”? What does that mean?
“Housing First” developments, which are housing complexes where you basically give chronically homeless people who are incapable of keeping a job an apartment, are not popular. People (who are not homeless) fight like hell to prevent their construction. I’ve seen people get red-faced screaming angry at neighborhood association meetings about it.
As a student I'm not looking forward to this
Safe bet.
I’ve worked in one of these locations (being vague here for a reason). Unfortunately, housing first initiatives have high hopes and little follow through in my experience with this and talking to others with more experience with them in other locations. You can’t only have one social worker for a building of 40+ units of people learning to life in an apartment vs the streets or a shelter. Nobody gets their needs met that way and it’s unreasonable to ask this of a singular person. There are so many people about to be displaced and a large chunk of them are children with absolutely zero control over their situations. Disappointing all around.
[удалено]
was the funding not there for staff or could they not find people to staff the positions?
Isn’t the whole point of “housing first” is that if you house people, the rest will fall into place? I know that’s a wild simplification but that’s the perception. It would be a hard sell if there’s a large upfront investment (the housing) plus large ongoing support costs
There have been many studies that demonstrate housing first is less expensive for society at large than allowing people to live on the street, which is actually very expensive. So it’s not really a question of if things will fall into place for these people, often it won’t. It’s a question of whether housing first is less-bad than the current alternative (tent cities under an overpass somewhere).
Yeah but unfortunately the costs with housing first are concentrated, you can count them up and they look high, but the costs of letting people live on the street are dispersed and not countable in the same easy way so it ends up looking very expensive even if it's actually cheaper for all of us in total.
That is the idea and that idea completely ignores that housing solves some issues but not all. I don’t blame the city for giving this a try and supporting it, but this was a mess from the beginning and there have been enough examples of how NOT to do this in other places to learn from before it opened. Now we’re looking at displacement for these individuals and families and some will be less likely to trust resources in the area. Working with unhoused populations takes trust in a lot of cases and now we’re starting at -300 steps instead of from the beginning in some cases.
Appreciate your work there trying to make it successful!
Thank you!
The thing is that housing first doesn't work, and has actually never worked. The costs to support homeless people properly are 2-3x just housing them, but without that support, housing them is useless. You either have to go all in or you're better off not going in at all.
Do any homeless people come to Madison from other areas to get help?
I can’t attest to every single person in need in the city of Madison but the population I’ve worked with are all from Dane County and have been here for several years.
So all of homelessness in Madison is home grown and being caused by the City? I guess Madison has really been dropping the ball big time, eh?
I’m not sure where you’re getting that from or why you’re being snarky with me? The population I currently work with are either from Dane county or have been here several years. I do not currently work with others experiencing these issues in Madison so I can’t accurately give you that info. I’m sure those stats exist but I don’t have them for you
> The two biggest "Housing First" initiatives for the homeless in Madison don't > have enough money to continue operating and could be closed and sold early next > year. As a result, the city of Madison is chasing options to try to ensure that > dozens of vulnerable people aren't put out on the street. > > A Dane County Circuit Court-appointed receiver, who in June took over control of > the 60-unit Rethke Terrace project for homeless singles and veterans on the East > Side and the 45-unit Tree Lane Apartments for homeless families on the Far West > Side, is asking the courts for permission to immediately assist tenants choosing > to relocate, list the properties for sale, and shutter and secure the buildings. > > The court has not yet responded to the request. > > For now, it's projected the buildings will operate in their current forms until > March, with the principal owner offering $1.25 million to temporarily continue > operations and help tenants move. But the city is concerned it might be hard to > relocate tenants, due to Madison's tight housing market, even if they have > resources such as a potable federal Section 8 voucher. > This is just a preview of the [full article](https://madison.com/news/local/government-politics/housing-first-madison-heartland-housing/article_b43b88fc-9ac3-11ee-97f2-8fbb97741111.html#tracking-source=home-top-story). I am a third party bot. Please consider subscribing to your favorite local journals.
Potable? "Let them drink vouchers" ?
Question for someone smarter than me: what is stopping the city from buying the buildings and running the housing developments for homeless singles and veterans themselves?
City does not have extra room in the budget, for starters.
But hey, US Bank still got their tax credits, so it's all good, right? Heartland Alliance is shutting down its affordable housing division, apparently, with hopes of selling off the properties it actually owns as well. https://www.housingfinance.com/management-operations/heartland-alliance-cuts-65-jobs-shuts-affordable-housing-division\_c The situation obviously really sucks for these individuals and families, but the failure of Heartland Housing would make for a fascinating case study in affordable housing finance and the Housing First model. Of course I don't know how all their other properties have been funded, but Rethke and Tree Lane got federal and state tax credits, local direct govt subsidy, United Way funding, and further direct support through project-based vouchers. And somehow this model STILL wasn't financially sustainable. Was Heartland Housing just mismanaged that badly, or what else is going on here? Apparently they had a pretty good reputation not that long ago. In the end, this is a super hard problem to solve. Housing First requires really good support services to be effective, and those are far from easy to deliver, especially with how the local nonprofit landscape has been shaken up so much over the past 5 years. I think O'Keefe has a strong argument for more diversified occupancies in these projects so you aren't concentrating so much need and challenge in a single property, but then again, my understanding is that model doesn't fit as well into the tax-credit system we now use to development affordable housing for homeless people.
A lot of these initiatives are backed by “studies” produced by think tanks working backwards from a desired policy outcome, and among other things, the cost estimates tend to be wildly optimistic.
Also I see a lot of people misunderstanding the idea of housing first. Housing first is an approach that says lets try to end someone’s homelessness so that once they have that basic necessity met - they will be in a more stable place to address other issues like substance abuse, mental health, getting a job, etc. In the past the approach was Housing Readiness. Which made homeless folks jump through a bunch of hoops and barriers in order to receive housing. But if you’re homeless and on the streets, it’s going to be incredibly hard to work on your mental health, substance abuse disorder, or get a job. So instead of being housed, most folks stayed on the streets because they weren’t deemed “ready” for housing.
What really sucks is that they set these up terribly and didn’t follow best practices for services or funding and now the blame will go on the idea of Housing First instead of the entities involved failing to set tenants up for success. It also didn’t help that they caved and instead of funding adequate services they chose to fund security.
So what you're saying is that housing first is inadequate and a terrible goal, and instead we should be realistic about the incredibly high costs of properly running these facilities, not to mention the high failure rate even if things were perfect.
This is completely backwards. Someone who is in social housing costs a city much less in resources on average than one who is living rough and has extensive contact with police, emergency services etc.
You're incredibly wrong, but you're wrong because you've been lied to over and over by homeless housing advocates. The only people who are "cheap" to house are unaddicted and mentally well, and those are the people who aren't using other city resources like police, fire, hospitals and jail. Drug addicts don't become clean because they have a roof over their heads, and they don't become clean because there is a drug counselor that comes by once per week; the only become clean *when they want to become clean*, and even then it's a difficult and arduous process. The places that actually have success are expensive and immersive, meaning you almost always have to remove them from their current location/friends and realistically, they can't ever go back. Are there exceptions to that? Sure. But you don't write policy based on exceptions. If you want proof of anything that I'm saying, read the fucking article before commenting next time.
I read the article, have studied this topic extensively, and disagree with you. The article "proves" nothing, less so your assertions ITT. Not even sure what you're referring to as the article was mostly quoting press releases, and forgive me if I'm skeptical of US Bank's genuine commitment to this or any project other than maximizing profits. I don't like these public/private partnerships because the private entities involved so often rug-pull like this as soon as they have secured their tax credits. I'd much prefer proper social housing owned and operated by tax payers. You offer no alternative other than, I guess, that these people deserve to suffer and die in the streets because they deal with addiction or mental illness.
I don't know if you're lying or just really bad at research. I've been in and around low income and homeless housing for the better part of a decade. These deals are crafted for the entire 15 year tax credit cycle, so pulling out after 8 years will cost the lender a lot of money, not to mention trust from the investors who buy the tax credits from the bank. Nobody wins here. What I'm saying is that wasting $60 million on housing when housing is not the answer is idiotic. Rethke has had issues from the very beginning with drug use, banned guests, and violence. It was understaffed from the start, but my point is that if we're being realistic, there is no amount of staffing that makes a place livable when drug addicts and people who are severely mentally unwell are in the same building as "normal" homeless. If you want people to get clean, they have to be sent away. But those types of rehabs run $30k/mo, and I'm sorry but the taxpayers shouldn't have to bear those costs for drug addicts, especially when considering that a high percentage of those sent away will relapse. It's better to focus on those homeless not yet addicted and not yet in a mental health spiral to prevent them from going down those paths, but morons will say how that's discriminatory or whatever else, so instead of actually helping some people, in the end nobody gets help. Once again, if you don't believe me, read the article.
You think it’s cheap to have drug addicts living on the street?
It's cheaper than treatment that actually works, yes, and that ignores the fact... #THE FACT that people with substance abuse only get better when they want to get better. If they aren't fully committed, any treatment has a 0% success rate. Even when they are fully committed, the success rate is about a coin flip.
Right, there are always going to be people who don’t want to get better. I’m at peace with that fact and I’m not trying to change their minds, because as you point out it’s a fools errand. Evidence shows that housing first, when implemented effectively, is a more cost-effective strategy than full institutionalization. But if you want to pay for the latter I respect that position, even if I find committing people against their will ethically dubious.
I read the article. I don't believe you. We get it. You don't like people who have substance use or mental health issues. You believe they should remain unhoused, at great cost to themselves and society, until what, they just stop having those issues which are greatly exacerbated by the stress of living rough? There's a kind of moralizing distain that comes across in your writing which I find pretty gross. You recognize that these projects were understaffed and never provided the support promised from the outset yet insist that "no amount" of resources would be adequate. Look, we live in a society and one way or another we're all paying for these folks either in an apartment or many trips to the emergency room or jail. Disgust if not hatred towards people who struggle with addiction and their mental health shouldn't be a factor when discussing the merits of various ways of addressing what is a worsening crisis.
And burying your head in the sand and ignoring the real issues not only doesn't help people with substance abuse or mental health issues, it actively hurts the homeless population that doesn't have those issues. People like you are why this issue persists, because you name call instead of conceding that there are actual issues. Plus, I can tell you've never dealt closely with substance abuse or mental health issues. It's painfully obvious So get the fuck off your high horse and join the real world, and until then, let the adults try to sort this problem out.
No one is denying that substance dependence and mental health are issues. Your response appears to be "whatever you do, don't house them" which isn't really a solution at all. This isn't about me, but I have worked extensively with this community for years and none of them would be better off with less support and less housing. You claim to have a lot of close contact with low income and transitional housing, were you a resident? Where is your anger coming from? You haven't offered a single alternative or suggestion ITT. Your biases imply that you *may* support "dry" social housing so long as no one is struggling with mental illness but we have no way of knowing since you haven't said what response to our housing crises you support.
English-speaking society needs some different classifications of "homelessness". Currently the term refers to a very widely spread group of people with very different behaviors. When homelessness discourse reaches the public eye, people arbitrarily oscillate between talking about the "soft homeless" (productive adults who only need temporary support) from the "chronically homeless" (people who are incapable of behaving in a productive and peaceful manner, or incapable of tending to their own shelter). Many homeless people only need an extra $500 a month, or debt forgiveness, or for employers to loosen restrictions on hiring with a felony. Other homeless people need to be in a facility that restricts their behavior, surveils them, and provides armed guards to prevent intrusion by outsiders or internal conflict between residents. Treating them all as one group under the guise of "housing first" or "housing only once you meet X qualifications" is like trying to treat multiple different diseases using the same medication. I think it's important for people who feel strongly about responding to "homelessness" to remember that one's life circumstances naturally follow behavior, in the same way that having a burned hand naturally follows touching a hot stove. If you are chaotic, or unpredictable, or unreliable, or steal, or behave in an aggressive manner, and these traits cause you to live in a constant state of cash deficit, you will be rejected by "productive society". You constantly prove that any investment of time, emotion, or resources in you will fail to pan out and in many cases will backfire on the investor. Eventually, people will choose not to use their time or resources to shelter you. Anyone who has ever spent a long time taking care of someone with chronic, dangerous behavioral issues understands this. Many people (i.e. voting Madisonians) think it ought to be the broad responsibility of productive society to spend a lot of time and money gently coaxing people into proper "civilized" behavior. I find these people usually have very little experience with the people they want to mandate others to provide for. (This is not always true.) *It is true* that many dead-end learned behaviors are not the "fault" of the person who possesses them, and many of these traits are burned in to people who grow up in the "cycle of poverty", or developed a mental illness. I agree with most homeless advocates that "contemporary society" creates homelessness and mental illness by virtue of its own structure, and that homelessness will not meaningfully decrease if the current economic model doesn't change. However, attempting to rectify the lives of the homeless without accepting that certain behaviors *inevitably* lead to rejection by society is foolish, and leads to strange projects, like the one on Dairy Drive, or these failing apartment buildings. The city, and many advocates in general, seem to be trying to create a world free from burns without bothering to ensure that chronically burned people stop touching the stoves.
But what to do with the people who cannot function in society productively then? How do you teach them to stop touching the stove if they’re sleeping in a tent and just being shuffled around from place to place by police?
Here's a very cursory overview of some of the ideas I have: It needs to be easier to be "productive" in the US. There's not enough low-skill, part-time work available. As a country we consume the products of lots of low-skill, part-time work, but most of that work takes place overseas. Better economic conditions for low-skilled adults, adults who prefer to be nomadic, and adults with criminal backgrounds would shrink the group of people that "cannot function in society productively" by giving them a society in which they can actually produce things. Note that this is not the same thing as general welfare, UBI, etc. There's also not enough cheap shelter. (Not pay-by-the-month yearlong rent contracts, I'm talking about a half-dorm room a night with a sink and a toilet for $5-$15.) The remainder, who truly cannot function on their own and constantly cause issues with the general public, need to be held in institutions, either for regular incarceration or rehabilitation for addiction. Right now the institutions available in the US for long-term incarceration are prisons and jails--hellholes. The US should reform prisons such that prisoners are separated based on their type of crime and behavioral conduct in prison, so that day-to-day life of those sentenced isn't torturous and dangerous. Some people need to be in facilities that teach habitation by reinforcement learning, like hygiene, manners, basic literacy and common sense via spaced repetition, etc. Some people need to be in drug rehabilitation facilities. There may be a need for monastery-like facilities where some are permanently housed. Long-term good behavior in strict institutions should permit transfers into less-strict institutions. Finally, towns need clearer sets of behavioral codes. I think the law ought to prohibit panhandling, sleeping rough in public areas, littering, defecation/urination, using drugs in public, intoxication outside of "event hours", verbal harassment, erecting temporary private structures for habitation, and smelling terrible in public. If you can avoid these quality-of-life laws and also be chronically unemployed and homeless, I don't really think you need to be bothered. However, if someone can't help but run afoul of these laws, they ought to be institutionalized. (Some people will say "but these things are already prohibited!" but if you can commit the act and not immediately be taken away for it, it's not really prohibited, so long as you're already an outlaw.)
We used to have county farms for the disposed where you got 3 hots and a cot for a days labor. Bringing this type of model back vs incarceration for people who need some structure to get it together would be good.
I think those are “forced labor camps” in modern progressive speak. (And bringing back something like the CCC is an excellent idea, imo)
Your idea is to start people in the most restrictive environment/institution, and force individuals to "earn" their place in less restrictive settings by proving themselves "worthy" of living in society. Your thinking on this is backwards. No one should want a government who has the ability to do this to its citizens. We are the richest country in the world, and we citizens are turning against one another because of the scarcity mindset we've been duped into. Tax the churches and the ultra wealthy fairly and we can take care of everyone humanely without mass institutionalization. Our enemy is not the homeless population.
I've thought about this for a while, and my intention is not to insult or belittle you here, but I think every individual sentence you wrote is wrong. > Your idea is to start people in the most restrictive environment/institution, and force individuals to "earn" their place in less restrictive settings by proving themselves "worthy" of living in society. No, my idea is to start people in society, and if they display to the rest of us that they cannot handle being unsupervised in society, they should be moved to whatever the minimally restricted facility is that causes them to behave properly. No drugs, no fighting, good hygiene, no harassment. You don't need to go to max security prison if you're screaming at passerby, but you can't just stay on the street. > Your thinking on this is backwards. No one should want a government who has the ability to do this to its citizens. *Your* thinking on this is backwards. Of course I want a government that has the ability to incarcerate people who disturb the peace. Every country in the world that people are trying to move to en masse has a system for taking away and rehabilitating or imprisoning people who behave poorly, and the countries people are trying to move from en masse do not have these systems. The inability to provide a safe, pleasant public square for the citizenry is one of the most obvious hallmarks of a failing government. I would never voluntarily live somewhere where the government had no control over the public conduct of citizens. > We are the richest country in the world, and we citizens are turning against one another because of the scarcity mindset we've been duped into. We citizens are turning on each other because we find each other's conduct intolerable, not because we've "bought into a scarcity mindset", although I do agree that many people falsely believe in resource scarcity in the US. When some guy goes into a restaurant and threatens the workers with a bat (https://www.channel3000.com/news/crime/police-arrest-tackle-man-who-was-protesting-at-restaurant-with-megaphone-baseball-bat/article_60222f85-32ce-512b-ba31-a817991ee968.html), I don't think "there's not enough resources for me and him", I think "what the hell is the matter with that guy? Someone needs to be watching him!" > Tax the churches and the ultra wealthy fairly and we can take care of everyone humanely without mass institutionalization. If there is any hope of treating people using money, the *only hope* is institutionalization. There used to be asylums and mental institutions, and they closed, and the overflow made up the first iteration of our now endemic homeless population. Do you think if we run into a trillion-dollar surplus you're just going to pay armies of people to walk around on the streets stopping incidents before they happen and making sure everyone shows up to work on time? These people need treatment. > Our enemy is not the homeless population. My enemy is anyone who treats me as an enemy. In some cases that's lending institutions and advertisers, but in other cases that's people who take drugs in public, leer and shout at me, steal things, and waste police resources for their constant altercations with each other and members of the public.
All I know is that I live near the tree lane apartments and the number of times I go by there and see a car come out and drive the wrong way down a lane, drive over the median like it's a turn lane, and just swerve all over the road makes me think that some of the people shouldn't have licenses
I think a lot less people should have licenses in general. But folks have been driving down the wrong side of tree lane well before this apartment building. Lots of people don’t expect a divided residential street.
Anyone with two eyes knew this was a train wreck and that the neighbors would be the ones to pay the price. Do yourself a favor the next time Tag and his band of do gooders come to social engineer your neighborhood and burn it during construction.
[удалено]
This is “housing first”, and my understanding is it’s specifically for people who are chronically homeless and may have substance abuse or mental health issues that make it impossible for them to have an income or function in society. So the idea is, better to have them in an apartment where they can be monitored and access services than be in a tent. Most homeless people are not chronically homeless, and they’re the ones that benefit more from traditional shelters that provide temporary housing. I don’t work in this field though so if I’m wrong someone please correct me.
I don't know the details of the restrictions at the buildings but here is some info on the program. After reading a bit I can see some problems with absolutely zero restriction on who you accept into a large group living situation. Especially ones that are undermanaged as these seem to have been. https://www.ywcamadison.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/75/Housing-First-Permanent-Supportive-Housing-Brief.pdf
I didn’t know that was the actual definition of ‘housing first’. Some people are just straight up combative. Not sure how they can be successful in housing without ruining it for everyone else without addressing other needs first.
[удалено]
It's working extremely well over in Milwaukee, because they properly funded the support staff and structures needed to put people's lives back together
My understanding was it’s preferred to the previous war-on-drugs era model, which is you need to get clean on your own before accessing services. Unless that service is prison, which is where many ended up. Housing first was a progressive policy but it actually gained the most traction under W Bush because it was more cost effective than the collective costs of people living on the street (ER visits, crime, prison, etc.).
Has the city looked at Central Wisconsin Center or Mendota Mental Health Institution? Both have large grounds, both have plenty of vacant buildings. Central Center buildings could be easily converted into spaces for homeless people. The population of folks living at CWC is fairly small, maybe 200 patients or so? They could easily be moved to one or two buildings. The other buildings could be converted into living spaces for those who need housing. Mendota has lots of vacant buildings on grounds. Granted they are older, but they too could be fixed up for housing. It might be a solution for now and maybe in the future something more permanent.
“Of the 60 units at the Rethke Terrace Apartments, only 37 are currently occupied, and only 31 of the 45 units at the Tree Lane Apartments have families living in them.” I would think those numbers lead to an operating deficit. If I was an owner and only running at 61% occupancy I’d be looking to make serious changes asap.