Michael Shellenberger's Solution for the Homeless Problem in California

Let's break down how that works. Okay. So first of all, what are the numbers? What's the number of homeless people in Los Angeles currently? Because Los Angeles is the big problem. If you'll be the governor, you're going to have to deal with, obviously San Francisco is the other big problem, San Diego much less so. I'll tell you the official numbers, but they're wrong because they're two and a half years old and they were probably under counts in the year 2020. But it's in LA County, 60,000 homeless. In LA City, 44,000. All of California, 116,000 unsheltered, meaning outside and tents. 160,000 total, meaning unsheltered and in shelters. How is it 100,000 in Los Angeles? In Los Angeles County, in Los Angeles City, but in only another 16,000 the rest of the state? No, no, 60,000 in LA County. Right. 40,000 in LA property. Oh yeah, sorry, but the 60,000 includes the 44,000. And San Francisco has somewhere between, I would say officially it has 8,000 total homeless, but I think it's much more likely to be 10 to 12,000 total homeless of whom six to, I would say around six to eight are unsheltered. Now during a year, at least 25,000 unsheltered homeless pass through the city. You get a lot of movement. So do you consider that people without tents, are they unsheltered? No, no, the people in the tents are considered unsheltered homeless. Oh, okay. So these are people, the only people considered sheltered are people in official shelters. I see, I see. Yeah. So roughly speaking, you're talking about someone in the neighborhood of 200,000 people in the state. It could be that many. It's a daunting task when you consider it. Particularly since the models that we have are of the five European cities that shut down their homeless encampments. One thing I discovered is that the Europeans called them open drug scenes. We euphemistically refer to them as homeless encampments, which makes them sound like they're roasting, they're making marshmallow s'mores. Yeah, and then also it brings us back to that they're down in their luck narrative. Right. That they're ochis is the picture. They're just ochis. They just can't afford the rent. No, they're not their- Ochis? Well, remember the Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel is the, they came from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, they came to California and then they lived in tents. And so this archetypal, when people that would never go and talk to homeless people or much less interview them, they'd look at those tents and they'd go, they're poor people. That's like how the mentality works as opposed to like, no, no, they became addicted to hard drugs. They stopped working. They overstayed their welcome with friends and family. They usually often, often stole money or lied or cheated from the folks they were staying with. And then they were finally kicked out onto the street and then they go just live in the open drug markets and the open drug markets become the open drug scenes. One of the characters in San Francisco, he was like, when we were walking through the Tenderloin, which is like the skid row of San Francisco, he goes, yeah, that's the door well I used to sleep in because I didn't want to walk five blocks away to the shelter. I wanted to be right where the drug dealers were. So part of it is that you see the other thing is that like the people often in the open drug scene might not be homeless in the sense that they might actually have places to stay. But what you'll see when you watch the open drug scenes is that people will come on their bikes or they'll walk through, they'll buy the drugs from the dealers and they'll use them right there. They're in such a hurry to get their fix. They'll buy the fentanyl and meth and they'll just sit right there. And then over a period of time, they're just there all the time with a little foil and lightning, the meth and fentanyl and smoking it and they just become catatonic. So we have these numbers. Let's just whatever the number is in LA, 100,000, let's say 100,000. Let's start with LA. What is available in terms of shelter and do you make new buildings? Do you buy buildings? Yes. Both. Yep. And it's not clear that I'm not sure yet. We have a working group on this and so we're looking at this. It's not clear where you start. One argument is that you start where you have the strongest local political support. So there is a mayoral election in LA. We'll see what happens. But for example, let's say the Sacramento mayor is like, Michael, we love your whole agenda. Let's start in Sacramento. Because what I feel very strongly about is that success breeds success. So we want to start somewhere where we get some good outcomes, where we see a big difference in a pretty short period of time, by which I mean months, not years, that it's humane, that we are using our emergency powers the least amount necessary because we want to protect human rights and individual rights which are now being violated. We want to protect those rights. We want to limit the powers that the governor has because the governor has absolutely extraordinary powers in disaster situations, which is what this is. You get success. Now you get people into shelter. You get people into rehabs. You get some people into psych hospitals. You might actually get people to go back home to Kentucky or Colorado or wherever they came from. But I think it's also fair to assume that some amount of those so-called unsheltered homeless addicts and mentally ill people will go somewhere else in the state where they're not being required to stay in the shelters because of course you've got to enforce the no camping. You've got to enforce the camping ban. Otherwise people, otherwise you destroy your cities which are being destroyed now and people are not getting the help they need. So one vision is that you would start where you have the strongest local support. Another vision is that you start in a smaller town. Another vision is that you start where it's hardest, which is which is LA. I would say start in LA just because it's too far gone and it needs to be cleaned up as quickly as possible and some headway needs to be done because it's just going to keep growing. Have you paid attention to what happened in Austin? Yes. Austin's been pretty interesting because the mayor who I had on the podcast, he really clearly stated that this is his goal. He said I want to clean this up before I leave office and if I don't do that I'll consider my tenure a failure. Good. And he did a lot. He's reversed himself because he had a ballot initiative passed that banned camping. He was the one that allowed public camping, right? And then there was a ballot initiative that passed that banned it. Now my understanding is that a lot of unsheltered homeless have moved into the woods, have moved into other parts of Austin. I haven't tracked it closely. But I mean at the end of the day- They've done a lot to put people into shelters. That's great. But the thing is if you don't kidnap them, it's very difficult. I mean I'm not saying you should kidnap people, but I'm saying if you don't physically force them into doing something, these people, I mean by nature that like the type of person that's willing to live on a tent on Cesar Chavez, like that's a radical mindset. Sorry to use the word radical again. They've disintegrated. Yeah, I mean you've gone that far. They've lost their, yeah, exactly. They're sending them a lawn chair on a major street in front of this tent that you live in and you're drinking water out of an old milk jug that you bought or got somewhere. It's crazy. The whole thing is crazy and they've done a great job in Austin of cleaning it up. One of the things that the mayor said, what I talked to him about, he said, we can clean up 3,000 people. We can do that. He goes, but if it gets to where Los Angeles is, that's untenable. It's unmanageable. That's what his thought was. He felt like it was so far gone that no one had the resources to gather up all those people and get them off the streets. That's not true. Okay, like Skid Row. That would be where you would start. You want to start? Start at Skid Row. I don't know that we'll start there. That's what I'm saying. See what I'm saying? That's such a giant problem. We'll get there. The other issue is that, and let me just address this other issue which you raised, which I think is an important issue, which is let's say we do a really good job and we get addicts and mentally ill people, more of them are coming to California and then we're shouldering the burden for the entire country. There's two answers to that. First is that we're going to need to ask the states that sent us their people to share that burden and or we're going to need to go to Congress and be like, look, if we're going to treat the nation's addicts in rehab facilities, then we're going to need to be reimbursed. We have mechanisms to do that. There's also a real danger if this becomes a place where people can go to clean up and people can go to be taken care of that more people come and then crime increases and then more people leave the state. The numbers of people that have left California over the last couple of years are staggering. That's right. We need all the other issues. Yes, that's definitely a concern. So you also need more police officers. So I point out you don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration, but that means that you need the three key P's more police, more psychiatry and more probation. So that is for sure part of this agenda. I think the other part of it that's not appreciated is that you need more development. When you visit Skid Row, so I've been in Northern California since 1993. When I went to Skid Row, I was like, this neighborhood is awesome. If you ignore the complete human depravity and tragedy on the ground. You look around the buildings and it's sunny and it's near the highways and you're like, this is an incredible neighborhood. It needs to be redeveloped. You need to have a much broader mix of people in there. They tried to do that for a while, right? This is something that's happening, but it needs to happen much more significantly, which means that we need to expedite and cut the red tape and get those buildings redeveloped and get people in there. And then it means that a lot of those services, you don't have like, there's no constitutional right to just go to be in Skid Row or in downtown LA or downtown San Francisco and just be given a free apartment. If you want rehab or if you're arrested and given the choice of rehab or prison, the rehab you might get might be in Fresno or Bakersfield or it might be in Yuba County or it might be in the Sierras and that might be where you should, that might be the best place to be 90 day rehab facility or 120 days where you're then on a fire crew. I mean, for heaven's sake, we need many more people working on preparing forests for and to prevent fires, for example, as one of the many things that we need to do in California. We like cleanups, cleanups, definitely. Absolutely. Prescribed burns, that's like manual hard labor. Not everybody's going to do it. Some people might learn Python at rehab. Some people might learn woodworking. Python? That's just a basic programming language. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about like cleaning up Python to Florida. You're going to ship them out to Florida? Maybe that too. This can be, I mean, one of the revolutions that we have not taken advantage either in schooling or in mental health care or rehab is personalization. I mean, everybody's different. Like there are some people that should be doing, people that would be great on a fire crew, working on Cal Fire. Other people could be helping other people to get into recovery. So we can do all those things with a centralized system, with a really good centralized system. And the other key ingredient that we don't have is professional assertive case managers where somebody is tracking your progress. If you're arrested or you overdose and you go into rehab, before you get out, there's a plan for you so that you don't just go right back on the street and start smoking fentanyl and overdose and die or just become an addict again. There's some plan for you. And we're going to keep a close eye on you and make sure that you commit to that plan. We know that people relapse, but we can reduce that amount of relapsing with a really engaged, good assertive case manager. And it may be that this is someone who does have a potential to be reunited with his family in Ohio. If that's the path, that's great. And we'll work with, I'll work with the governor of Ohio to get that done. I'll work with the Congress to make sure that there's Medicaid money for that person to get fixed and repair their life. But right now there is nothing like that. And that's what Cal Psych would do. So in the emergency response, I give myself two years before we go back to voters. I'm going to put, as soon as we come into office, day one, I'm going to the legislature and be like, here's my legislation for shelter first. That's the first thing, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned. You don't have an entitlement to your own apartment in LA. You don't just get to go to LA and be like, hey, I'm a homeless, I gotta give me my own apartment. It doesn't work. It's not ethical. It's not fair. And then they don't work. They're just going to be homeless. So we are going to enforce a statewide campaign ban. So where do you start, Venice? That's a good eyesore. I mean, give me, I've got a little bit of time to figure out where we start and some of it will depend on politics. Have you run numbers with anybody? We're doing that right now. Yeah. It seems like it's going to be- We're going to come in on my inauguration day with legislation that goes in front of legislature. And I'm going to take emergency actions as governor to deal with the disaster. We can get FEMA shelter set up, triage tents. We can get the National Guard involved if we need to in a strictly civilian capacity. How many people do you need in terms of like counselors, police officers, law enforcement, just to handle the homeless problem? It seems like you need a team. Oh, it's a huge, that's a great question. That's in many ways. There's sort of the institutional arrangement. There's where do you start geographically? There's how do you do the legal side? I assume we'll just be sued by ACLU. That's fine. We'll go to court over what we're doing. That's fine. And then there's workforce. And in some ways, the workforce is the most important thing. We're losing, I mean, both LA and San Francisco are short, like 500 police officers at this point.