I Saw 700 Homeless People In A Single Day

damn what are we gonna do about this mess if you've been following along with California's implosion you're aware of the disaster happening right before our eyes for the first time in the state's history California had a population decline it's getting more Lawless here there's a lot of bonehead decisions being made in Sacramento add in the High Cost of Living and tens of thousands of sensible families have had enough but there's a lot of new people moving here too many of them are here on California streets in this video I'm going to show every homeless person intent I saw while on my month-long road trip through California the total number of tents and homeless people I saw was 702 I counted them shot by shot of course it's easy to judge the first instinct is to wonder what tragedy befell these people most of the folks you'll see in public like this suffer from mental illness substance abuse or have just decided to check out a life for now you know I'm just gonna do this now California laws make that a lot easier than it should be but remember all these people have friends and family who care about them and are worried and every person out here has a story [Music] foreign to the latest numbers every day in America 208 people get out of homelessness that's great but 228 people become homeless every day that's not good they think there's a half million homeless people now but you could easily double that and when you see how embedded many of the people are on California streets I don't think the problem is going to get any better they think one out of three people sleeping on the streets in America is right here in California housing costs continue to go up and there just aren't enough places for all these people to live here in California there's 23 affordable housing options for every 100 people who need them and this is the fourth largest economy in the world remember that you could make an argument that this is a liberal thing and it's a good argument too a lot of our most liberal cities have the most people on the streets they let them poop and steal and Camp wherever they want they hand out drugs and then hand out Narcan in the next building down the street my God Democrats Market themselves as the party of the poor so keeping people poor is the best way to remain in office and when you're a sanctuary State who do you think is going to come that's the argument conservatives make anyways here in California all the regulations in red tape make building new units unprofitable there's rent control here so nobody with any cash wants to build anything cheap and saying that you have to have solar panels on every new building slows down affordable housing momentum everything's environmental here that sucks Austin Texas has made camping in public illegal Tennessee did the same thing and Portland is actually saying they're going to start enforcing public camping like this I know right Portland Oregon but here in California it's against state law to move people off the sidewalks unless they have enough shelter beds to put people in and there's not even close to enough shelter beds in California for all these people no way but voters have had enough they're sick of the growth streets the crime and the open drug use they put out an official poll and guess what homelessness was the number one thing California people are pissed off about imagine that [Music] good luck getting a conservative in office with a different approach though not in California is this a public policy thing though conservative states lack large homeless populations why is that well they're just not as generous or perhaps not as empathetic but it is true that a lot of red States send their homeless people to Blue States on buses get them out of here go out west do your thing out there yeah heroin booze meth even weed for a lot of these people it's a lost cause and the drugs are getting worse there's a new form of meth coming out of Mexico that basically erases your soul from your brain it's tragic and then fentanyl hooks you one time and you're done but we want to make it easy to cross our Southern borders right and I got out in 2017. and during that time my mom had passed and my father and my brother stole a bunch of money from me took cars to jury took guns they took two storage Bays I had my mother doing things for me while I was in prison you know I'm sending her money from a prison I've asked some of these people why don't you just leave you know go somewhere cheaper well some of them say I don't have the money to leave and I personally doubt a lot of them could hold a job anywhere anyways but a lot of these people say this is my home my family's here my friends are here I shouldn't have to leave the place I'm from I've also asked him about going home to their family but many of these people have burned Bridges their families just sick of them they could clean up they'd be welcomed back home but that's not going to happen for most of these people this is their life now did you ever think you'd end up homeless so who's to blame here is this about personal failure if it's personal failure then it's easy for you and I to dismiss this as a won't happen to me problem you know I feel bad for these people but they did this to themselves shame shame shame on you or is this a failure of government is all the money wasted a sign of incompetence looking around California and it seems they don't want to solve this problem the state has thrown billions at the problem and it's just getting worse La set aside like a billion dollars for affordable housing and Ten Years Later only 10 percent of the goal was met and in the meantime the number of people on the streets went up they think it would take one and a half billion to build enough shelter beds to clean the streets in San Francisco they also estimated it would cost 400 million dollars a year to keep those new shelters open can you believe that what kind of payroll do these shelter staffers make we could go on and on about the money wasted trying to fix this mess all these non-profits with their 200 000 a year salaries they're just pushing peas around the dinner plate why would they even want to solve homelessness anyways some will say these cities use this whole mess as a money-making opportunity getting Federal money for affordable housing and then not spending all of it well that sucks think of all the people in our own country we could help I'd rather help these people rebuild than help Ukraine rebuild just Sam people you could separate these people into four groups those who have had Misfortune the addicted the mentally ill and the bums now based on what I've seen and who I've talked to I think we could actually put a dent in homelessness for the misfortunate you know the people who lost their jobs or their spouses or who had a medical setback but they're working to get out of their situation or the elderly who just can't keep up with rent anymore on their social security bennies those people could stand to use some reasonable assistance with affordable housing I saw something in Seattle that looked like it had potential they were making these little tiny home communities all over town the responsible homeless like the work and poor I think they'd actually respect these homes and keep them nice maybe if they own their little houses they'd take pride in them you can build these things for like 30k each and give these people a manageable loan but can you build enough of these they're also experimenting with building what they call these Lego modular homes they can build a hundred unit housing structure in weeks for like 38 million bucks but these are in the hundreds of thousands each to construct and then there's always a question of where are you going to put these communities all the old rich white people don't want them near their houses for obvious reasons some large cities have temporary solutions hotel rooms and subsidized apartments but that's kind of a Band-Aid solution and then we have a moral question if we built a home for everybody who wanted one then where's the motivation to get ahead in life and is that fair to give everybody a house who wants one now we know that covid caused a lot of people to lose their homes but covid might actually provide an unexpected solution a lot of companies are now letting their people work from home now forever and there's a ton of unused office space in our downtowns now I think they need to turn all those old Office Buildings into condos or housing units that would at least help out the actual working crowd give them somewhere to live while they work on getting their lives in order now when it comes to the mentally ill they just need to set up a triage in these urban areas immediate medical attention on-site counseling and then maybe reopen all the Mental Hospitals that Reagan shut down I think some of the mentally ill could be reintroduced back out in the real world again but those who have ruined their brains with drugs are probably Beyond helping as far as the drunks the druggies and the bums they just want to live like this they don't want to follow the rules this is a lifestyle for them provided by the liberal governments in California but I think a lot of the addicts would benefit from treatment if they got some reliable help some of them would turn their lives around right some could probably work themselves back in a society again maybe through some sort of Civilian Conservation Corps program like what FDR did to get us out of the Great Depression I guess I could see some addicts responding if they had something meaningful to do like picking up trash or scrubbing their own off the sidewalks unless you're totally batshit crazy everyone's capable of doing something useful but again unless these people don't want help they offer it to them all the time and they always turn them down it seems like California leaders have realized money's not the problem it's policy thank God and believe it or not California is finally changing its ways some of the Cities out here are letting people add on apartments and units to their land so some of the work and poor can rent a room out that'll help a little bit but again that's the solution for the Working Poor not the druggy drunks Biden's American Rescue plan provided billions to cities to encourage affordable housing development and California is finally making it easier to build affordable housing by reducing all their red tape and regulations the biggest challenge now is finding neighborhoods that aren't going to and moan about low-income houses nearby and of course they're never going to build units for everyone it's just not possible I don't know what if we thought outside the box completely I was just in California City it's a desert town about an hour from L.A way out in the middle of nowhere there's all this land out there and roads in place and hardly anyone lives there the state could buy up all the land and then let everybody camp out there and do their thing far away from the rest of us I'm sure California City wouldn't want that though talk about a real free-for-all potential disaster we can't stop giving people free drugs we could treat their mental illness we can make housing more affordable and we can make it less easy for people to drop out of society and ruin downtowns we have the brains and money to make this all go away we got to do something because right now homelessness is ruining our biggest cities all over our downtowns people are just waiting to die The Walking Dead of America is living in cars on sidewalks on our beaches and in our sewers anybody out there have any big ideas because everyone that's supposed to be fixing this ain't doing quit calling them homeless people they're bums well that's not very PC of you Karen you could call him houseless or non-domiciled if you beg and smoke dope and your pants that makes you a bum my four-year-old can conduct himself better than these losers homelessness and poverty should not be politicized but they are everything's political these days we've had a rough go at it with our economy lately how bad are things going to get if the economy gets worse how would things look like if we further went down the socialism pathway are we creating a chronic dependence on government do these people even want a normal life anymore these are all good questions we don't know the answers to there's a lot of us who would say look live your lives the way you want if you want to do this fine just do this away from everyone else we're sick of it it's ugly it's gross it's uncomfortable and it's dangerous but our cities are being held hostage by a population that refuses to follow our laws and morals they say as California goes so goes the rest of the country if that's the case we're in deep the fourth richest economy on earth looks like the third world I think the rest of the world's looking at us like we're all a bunch of boneheads okay Hannibal thanks for for joining me to talk to me about homelessness in Houston um I was just in California and and it's a a really bad situation there with homelessness I honestly don't know what they're gonna do but I hear that Houston has made huge progress in getting a lot of people off the streets yes that is correct we have since 2011 we've decreased homelessness by 63 and we've placed almost 27 26 000 people into permanent housing with Supportive Services and we have about an 85 success rate in the programs that um in those programs so give people an idea how many homeless people at Last count when it was at the highest and when was that yeah so in 2011 we have the sixth highest population homeless population in the nation it was close to to 9 000 individuals at that time and last year's count in 2022 we are at about 3 200 individuals it's about um almost evenly split as far as people that are in shelter and people that are um on the streets so we had about 1500 people on the streets experiencing what we call unsheltered homelessness um but yeah back in 2011 we were not doing a great job and so we were declared a priority Community for the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development that meant that we weren't doing things um you know we weren't doing a great job and so it meant that we were assigned technical assistance to kind of get our act together and so that resulted in some technical ta providers coming into town and facilitating a large charette with all of our partners and at that time it was it was about a shared vision of what needed to happen um you know a shared vision of permanent housing with Supportive Services as the answer to homeless to in homelessness using the housing first model and then prioritizing the most vulnerable individuals first and during that time you know we we became better aligned we collaborated better we we found and determined who was doing a great job and and supported those organizations to continue doing that great work and then shifted things that maybe some organizations weren't doing a great job to others that were um and and it's really about you know even though Houston is the fourth largest city in the U.S we're very much a small community in the sense um because we were very collaborative we help one another it's all about helping my neighbor and homelessness um you know it's just a priority it's also we did have a lot of political will I will say that helped a lot um the mayor at the time anise Parker she made homelessness a priority and then Sylvester Turner who's in office now and came after continued that work and so um you know having that political will and backing behind us and then um you know sharing the the success and and bringing everyone to the table and becoming more transparent and collaborative is I would say is the key to our success okay so in 10 years it dropped by two-thirds correct were you around when it first in 2011 yeah so I was at a another non-profit at the time I started at the Coalition in 2013 but I was um you know at a different nonprofit that was part of the collaborative in 2011 so I actually participated in the charette as a service provider at the time so it was really great to see the differences between you know going from what it was everyone was kind of very siled and not talking to one another compared to what it is now where we all kind of we we know what everyone's doing the Coalition became the lead organization for the Continuum of Care and you know it's very transparent it's very collaborative and we just love all of our partners and they're doing a great job so what exactly um if you were going to highlight a couple of high-level things that Houston did back in 2011 to now what would be a couple of um just bullet points on things that you guys were able to do to get a lot of people off the streets yeah so um so I would say we we created a 5 2500 units of permanent supportive permanent Supportive Housing in order to House people that were the most vulnerable so at the time we had approximately a thousand individuals on our on our wait list that were experiencing chronic homelessness those are individuals that have been homeless for a long long time and have some kind of a disabling condition that prevents them from working and living independently we also had a very large number of homeless veterans and so the the the first Target I would say is um it's really great to have um a goal you know everyone is aligned towards a common goal and so um one of the first things that we we decided is that we wanted to end veteran homelessness by 2015. and so with that is um we decided we went to both public housing authorities and um both of them implemented what we call a homeless preference and that means that they allocated an X number of housing Choice vouchers every year from their General Pool towards homeless programs we all also better strategically use all of the Vash those are the vouchers that are specifically for veterans and then we position the supporter services for veteran family providers to provide the Supportive Services for veterans that might be newly homeless or we're about to become homeless and also that needed like deposit and stuff like that to move into their home and so we we started this boot camp process where we would just go out and get all of the veterans that we saw on the streets and bring them into one central location and then we would you know get everything that those veterans needed process their paperwork you know and just do that cycle over and over um you know several times until we got to the point where we actually ended veteran homelessness in June of 2015. so that was a big deal and we got a lot of public recognition and the more recognition and the more um you know great things that you do the more people and providers want to be a part of it and so from that um we shifted that that entire focus of how we did it's for veterans to people experiencing chronic homelessness so we're actually very close to ending chronic homelessness I would say we're you know we probably have about two to five hundred it varies every day um but that's you know that's significant um so the way that it was done before was pretty much about cherry picking and it was really about people that um individuals or clients that knew how to work the system that would get the assistance that they needed and so that left a lot of very vulnerable individuals on the streets and the way that with coordinated entry that that that it leveled the playing field everyone has the same assessment process they only have to tell their story one time it lives within our homeless management information system and then from there we created almost 3 000 um Slots of permanent Supportive Housing which really um did you know just made significant strides in in um decreasing the number of individuals experiencing homelessness I will say one of the things that we do here is we put the bulk of our resources into permanent Solutions we don't have um a lot of shelter we don't put a lot of funding into shelter the shelters that we do have are either privately funded or get very little government assistance the bulk of the resources we put into permanent housing because we know that permanent permanent housing would Supportive Services is really the only way to end homelessness so how many units did you have to how many affordable units did Houston build in the last 11 years so we haven't really built that many I mean we did create several new properties I will say um I don't I can get the numbers for you but I don't have it off the top of my head so there was there was some new construction um but there's also was some rehab that happened but I will say that Houston has always traditionally been a city where the cost of living is lower compared to some of the other larger cities and so we have a very large amount of apartment complexes that are affordable and so we are able to actually take people with a voucher in hand and put them into a scattered site unit which is you know just a regular apartment like everyone else you know can can access and those apartments meet the HUD fair market rent where you know starting to tighten up a little bit I will say over the last few years because just like with everyone else but we still have quite a few apartment complexes that meet that HUD fair market rent and that we can we can tap into to house individuals so if I'm gonna decipher what you guys did because I I don't work with the homeless and all the terms and the and the phrases um you just went out Case by case one by one found out an individual's need in history and then placed them pretty much in a in a permanent how affordable housing solution that the city already had on hand um why doesn't California do that too is it because there's too many people it's at the cost of living cost of living and it's the cost of living in the housing cost so an apartment one bedroom apartment in California is likely five thousand five times higher than it is in Houston you can still find an apartment a one-bedroom apartment here in Houston for 800 900 um a thousand dollars in California I've heard that that's you know three times four times as much and so you can imagine you know the the someone experiencing homelessness that if they're living on Social Security especially and Social Security costs are you know they don't vary very much between different states and so how can someone who's you know living paycheck to paycheck or very very low income afford something like that on top of that there's just not a enough from what I'm hearing in California there's just not enough of those units to go around so even if there is a subsidy to pay for an apartment for you know three thousand dollars a month there's just not enough of those apartments to go around for not just people that are not homeless but people that are experiencing homelessness so of course I don't live in California this is just what I hear and read but I think that that's probably it I mean we you know traditionally a lot of these cities have not built affordable housing over the years and we are going to get into another Crunch and so we really need to build affordable housing Houston another thing that I've heard about La in specific is that there's a lot of zoning and there's a lot of pushback and not in my backyard so even though yes people want a solution to homelessness when it comes down to actually building a place somewhere no one wants it and then there's so many loopholes that people have to jump through the builders for you know Energy Efficiency and all the other different things um that kind of you know backlogs the process no no yeah environmental this that nobody wants a lot of people in Los Angeles San Diego San Francisco they want to help the homeless they feel bad but not in my backyard do it over there no I don't want that over here um so now that you have made a lot of progress in Houston and you see what's going on California is way worse what what do you think if anything what would you do if you were had the keys uh out in California is there anything they can do I really don't know to be honest we've actually talked about this internally with my co-workers we talk about it actually quite a bit about you know what would we do if we had to you know move to California and try to I mean the strategies that we've done here can be replicated um I'm sorry I you know not everybody may agree but it can um I will say that you know Houston doesn't have zoning but we still have not in my backyard I mean even though we don't have zoning there's still places that you know took a long time to build an apartment complex because people just didn't want it there um and and it's just I think the policies and um first of all wages wages have to keep up with um the cost of living and that's not happening right now um definitely the the zoning and the the building codes and all of that stuff in California there needs to be some kind of policy change around that from what I understand there's funding available to build and to address homelessness it's just getting through all that political uh there has to be political will there has to be um you know cutting through all of the bureaucracy before you can even kind of dig into that so that that's going to take a while yeah they get billions in funding and like they'll get up they'll get 10 billion dollars to do something and then 10 years later they've spent like 10 of it uh or done 10 of what they were we had 10 billion dollars here I would be feel very confident in saying that there would be no homeless people in the street a billion dollars I understand and that brings so so you guys have done a lot a lot of good things the the a lot of the non-profits in California take it take a a beating from the Press uh or from the public because they're like what are you guys doing like what are you spending all this money on do you have a thought on are some non-profits just not as effective as others is that is it just I don't I really couldn't say to be honest and you know I don't want to speak negatively about my colleagues in California I think they're doing a great job I think they're doing the best job that they can in the environment in which they're located and that's this that's the same for every single non-profit working with homelessness across the country um I think the intent is there I mean we don't go into this work because we we're going to make a lot of money right we want to do we want to do this because we think we're going to make a difference and I think that um you know we're fortunate in Houston because we have we've had a lot of circumstances in which um the the I guess the wind has has been in our favor you know um but but I will say that um you know those non-profits they're they're doing the they're trying they're trying they're trying from what I can see and I hear um but it's just really about you know government and politics and you know all of the different movers and shakers in the city um that need to kind of change the way that they think yeah well I've learned a lot you're more optimistic than I am but you've had success and I grew up in California and I've driven through that state so many times and I have been in really nasty places um it makes you just lose faith in humanity I was actually there I was asked to go to um um to USC to speak about home about you know homelessness and what we did with veteran homelessness because it was a veteran um Summit and you know there were people there from the county in the city um there were people there from the VA there were people there and you know everyone in that room wanted to do better there were veterans in that room you know they were trying so hard but the more that I got to understand what they have to deal with in their jobs as far as um like at that time is when there was issues happening in city with um the elected officials you know um and you know no one has like it's like everybody wants to be in control um and so it's it's just fighting within themselves fighting from the city in the county you know here in Houston the county and the city were aligned and for the most part and and there's there's political shifts you know sometimes there's more Commissioners that are Republicans sometimes there's less um but at the end of the day we're able to you know Advocate and explain about the work that we're doing to where the you know even the the the far right you know folks um you know vote in our favor so so um yeah it was a lot to you know I just felt so bad for them you know they have the resources they have the vouchers they have what they need to end veteran homelessness but they can't cut through all the red tape this politics they step on their own feet yep it's all politics yeah it's Houston mostly conservative City oh yeah okay yeah yeah um but I think that you know stereotype around the fact that people that are experiencing homelessness don't want to be don't want to be housed don't want to get out of that situation and that's not true I haven't had a single I've been doing this for 23 years now I haven't had a single person ever tell me um I chose to do this I want to be in this situation there are people that have some severe mental illnesses to where they can't even consent but that number is finite I mean it's it's tiny tiny tiny tiny and those those individuals yes they already had the mental illness to begin with and something just kind of made it worse but that's not the majority of people experiencing homelessness it's just a regular person like you and I there's a lot of people that live paycheck to paycheck and you never know what might happen to you know cause them to become homeless glad or else I I hope that other cities and states can can emulate your success down there in Houston Your Role Model it's not very often you hear about success stories with the homeless problem in this country and um you know hopefully other other cities and communities can learn from what you guys have done and and can put events in this huge problem yeah thank you so much appreciate it are you looking to move and need advice I do Consulting that's right I'll sit down and talk about where the next perfect place for you and your family should be I do it all the time together let's find you a new home that's safe and checks all your boxes and I can also help you find your new house too email me and I'll work with you on not just helping you figure out where to move but I can help you find your perfect home too that's right I know awesome reliable agents all over the country and I'd love to connect you to somebody who can help you search for that perfect home hey guys if you learned something new about America or what it's like to live in America great you should think about subscribing and turning on your notifications you can also click one of these videos or playlists for more this is page next manager this has been a Corner House Entertainment production

Channel: Nick Johnson

Views: 177,585

Keywords: homeless, homelessness, california, how bad is homelessness, crime, moving to california, california crime, homeless problems, homeless numbers, how many homeless people are there, how many homeless people in america, why are people homeless, us homeless population, homeless population 2023, how many veterans are homeless, immediate housing assistance homeless, oregon, washington, homeless housing, solving homelessness, houston homeless, why are there so many homeless people

Id: VaouILM21iM

Length: 35min 43sec (2143 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023