SF’s barrier-free homeless housing aggrandized drug overdoses

The County’s de jure homelessness approach, nicknamed Housing First, immediately provides unhoused individuals with lodgings, no strings attached. One’s criminal background/propensity and substance abuse are questioned only so the SCC can privilege more dangerous applicants with permanent (as opposed to “affordable” or shorter-term) housing options. City Journal’s Judge Glock analyzes frightening data on SF overdoses within these barrier-free arrangements.

It’s not surprising that housing filled with criminal addicts under zero requirements for treatment attracts problems. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation reported that in 2020–21, at least 166 people in the city’s permanent supportive housing program overdosed. This represented 14 percent of all overdoses in San Francisco during that period, even though these houses held less than 1 percent of the city’s population. One resident, Joel Yates, described what happened when he moved from a recovery house, which required sobriety, to a low-barrier supportive-housing unit: he quickly bumped into a neighbor on his floor who was smoking crack—and Yates relapsed.

The only reasons the number of overdoses in San Francisco housing is not higher is that, first, the city doesn’t track all overdoses, and, second, it has installed hallway Narcan dispensers to help revive overdosed residents. The horrific results of these programs confirm recent studies that show that the homeless placed in supportive housing are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than those left on the streets. And these grim findings dovetail with decades’ worth of research showing that boosting income to addicts increases their drug consumption and the likelihood of relapse. A free house frees addicts from lots of other expenses.

The drug-abuse problem in these units has gotten so bad that the federal government awarded the largest homeless-housing provider, CSH, almost $4 million to research “overdose prevention practices in permanent supportive housing.” The outcome of the research, by the very definition of permanent supportive housing, cannot be to discourage drug abuse.

This article originally appeared in City Journal. Read the whole thing here.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity