Emma Pettit on the Homelessness Wars, Then and Now

[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, okay, you know that I was born in Canada, grew up in the East Coast, moved to Seattle now, it would be 2004, so that's whatever it is, 22 years ago or so.

[00:00:32] And the one thing that really struck me at the time and still strikes me is how many Seattleites seem just so reluctant for the city to tell homeless people, you can't do that here, you can't pitch a tent here. Although that value seems to have been put to the test in recent years.

[00:00:49] Ah, yes, I would say that's an understatement. It has indeed been put to the test. So just by way of preface for this, I mean, stop the sweeps, right, became the bumper sticker mantra, I think, for Seattle's left about a decade ago. So, you know, the city at that time had a policy where they cleared homeless encampments on a semi-regular basis. And in 2016 here in Seattle, the ACLU proposed sweeping legislation that…

[00:01:19] Sweeping, sweeping legislation. Sweeping legislation, yeah, it was pretty restrictive and it was very much, you know, promoted under the banner of, quote, stop the sweeps, exclamation point, unquote. At the time, I was advising the then mayor of Seattle, so it was very much on our radar screen. And it initially passed the city council in a committee seven to one before the opposition from the mayor and then mounting public backlash to what the implications of that legislation were going to be halted its passage.

[00:01:47] And I would say that was just kind of the opening salvo in a battle that we've been having in Seattle and a lot of other similar kinds of cities since then. And the other point I would make, though, is that it really is worth noting that for two years during the pandemic, we did stop the sweeps in Seattle, right, for public health reasons, or at least that was a justification.

[00:02:10] And during that period, the Seattle City Council, which was dominated by the progressive left at that point, defunded the team, fully defunded the team that did encampment clearances in August of 2020. And let me just say this. It did not go well, right? I mean, after mega encampments formed in parks and near playgrounds, street disorder rose, people started complaining about stepping on needles and things like that as they're kind of taking their kids to the park or whatever.

[00:02:38] It set off a sustained public backlash, even here in Seattle, one of the most left leaning cities in the country that for the next two election cycles put the city's progressive left on their back heels as more moderate candidates prevailed in mayoral and council races. And so I think that's the context in which we want to talk to our guests today. Yeah. Seattle never actually defunded the police, but we wanted to, though, David. We really, really wanted to.

[00:03:04] But yeah. So in any case, our guest today looks at these fights. Who's the French historian who talked about the long durée, Sandeep? Oh, God, I don't know who you're asking. Is that? Yeah, I'm forgetting the name. But in any case, that's kind of a long time ago, so we don't remember any of it. Yeah, right. We forget. But in any case, our guest today has taken a deep dive into this topic. Emma Pettit worked at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

[00:03:31] She's now a senior reporter at Longview, a new independent journalism outlet that focuses on narrative audio documentaries, which is what she's produced, and investigative journalism, which is a piece of this. So check it out. Their podcast is called Reflector, and Emma Pettit is the reporter behind a fantastic three-part audio documentary about homelessness called Street Fight, A History of Homelessness in America.

[00:03:56] And it's got this really provocative subtitle that I want to get into here at some point, How America Chose Homelessness, because I don't think America thinks it chose homelessness. Emma Pettit, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. By the way, Braudel. Braudel is your long-drae analysis school. That's it. The longue durée, Braudel. All right. There you go. So first of all, I just want to say how much I loved listening to this series, because it's sort of the radio geek in me.

[00:04:25] I mean, it's got all of this wonderful archival audio and music, and it's got this great conversational pacing. Kind of sounds like Radiolab or The Daily. But first, I just wanted to ask about how you got involved with Longview and Andy Mills, who coincidentally Sandeep and I met here in Seattle. This would have been maybe 2025. And he was talking about this exciting project, but I don't think it had come to fruition quite yet. And Andy is one of the creators of The Daily, for folks who don't know.

[00:04:56] And did the witch trials of J.K. Rowling, right? Yes. So how did you get involved with Reflector and Longview, and kind of what's the vision, and how does this series reflect that? Yeah, what the hell is it? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Good question. We've got a lot of names floating around. But yeah, it's funny you mentioned it sounds like both Radiolab and The Daily.

[00:05:21] So Andy Mills, who is now my boss, used to work at Radiolab. He co-created The Daily. And then he and Matt Bull decided to start their own thing, which is Longview.

[00:05:34] And the idea behind the company, the idea behind kind of their ethos for journalism is that when the temperature gets very high around social, political, scientific debates, the answer is not to become more ideological or more strident in your journalism.

[00:05:57] The goal is hopefully to help people understand how we got here, why people have such divergent points of view, and also the broader history that we're sitting in. I think Andy and Matt and I think that a lot of these debates, a lot of the things that you cover on Blue City Blues and elsewhere, they're just like this modern iteration of a fight or an argument or a development that has happened over a long period of time and will continue to happen, right?

[00:06:26] And I just always feel so much more informed when I'm thinking about that longer history and when I'm hearing from people who have thought about these questions or fought about these questions in the past, in the future. I think that really lends itself to being an informed citizen as maybe Girl Scout, as that sounds. And as for how I got involved, I was a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education for eight years.

[00:06:55] And before that, I was a reporter in Arkansas for a couple years right out of college. So I'd been doing print journalism for a decade and trying to write beautiful sentences and do the kind of magazine narrative journalism that we all toil over and that I'm sure people read for about 30 seconds until they get a notification on their phone that their DoorDash has arrived.

[00:07:24] And I, you know, you do something for a while and you want to try something different. And I'd heard Andy and Matt even before Longview had a name. They've done some amazing podcasts. They had done The Witch Trials. They had done The Last Invention, which is about AI. And they'd done episodes of Reflector.

[00:07:45] And I had listened to them just as a news consumer and just thought like, wow, this is both artistically incredible and also I think I have like kindred spirits with these people and how journalism should be done. So when they were hiring and when I felt like it was time for a change, yeah, I applied and I joined in May.

[00:08:14] I really do love the historical sweep that you all bring to the kind of questions you take up, including in this three-part series, Emma, that you did on homelessness. And I want to dive into some of the details of that in a bit. But let me first ask, why did you decide, hey, man, let me take up this thing about homelessness? What has happened here in, you know, urban America with this particular issue?

[00:08:40] What prompted you to kind of decide this is what you wanted to focus on? Right. No, it's a good question because homelessness can – if you live in a city at all, homelessness can feel just this like tragic, ordinary thing, right? And I actually – I was not totally convinced that there was a story here.

[00:09:04] My editor, Andy, when we were batting around ideas in my first week or so of work, he mentioned being interested in the history of homelessness more around the idea of vagrancy laws, which we touch on just a little bit. But there used to be laws that would outlaw vagrants, vagabonds. You couldn't be a certain type of person in a town. And eventually that changed.

[00:09:32] And, you know, as people were granted more civil rights, our laws were dictated towards behavior as opposed to the type of person that you are. And so he asked me to kind of look into homelessness, look into that history. And I was a new employee trying to impress my new boss and was like, okay, like let's find something interesting.

[00:09:58] And there were two things that let me think, oh, there's something here. The first one is the story of a woman that we tell who used to live in New York City in the 80s, which I want to get to. The other one is something that I'm curious for your thoughts on, which were the Spencer Pratt ads that had just dominated my ex-feed at the time. I'm curious.

[00:10:28] I mean – In the run-up to the L.A. mayoral primary earlier this year. Yeah, yeah. And I watched one in particular, and I'm curious what you guys thought of it, of Spencer Pratt, who I best knew as a kind of washed-up television, reality television star. He was like kind of the terrible boyfriend on the hills that I've caught some episodes of.

[00:10:50] And all of a sudden, he was, you know, had a fighting chance at maybe becoming liberal L.A.'s next mayor. And he was riding this like populist wave of anger, it seemed, over the city's handling of homelessness.

[00:11:13] And there was an ad in particular that was like AI-generated where it's like the ruling class of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, like sitting on thrones laughing at the constituents who are just sobbing and asking for like the homeless, you know, crack dealers to be locked up. Something along those lines.

[00:11:39] And then here comes Spencer Pratt in like a Batman costume to save everybody. And like it was interesting. Like I feel like a big – Which we all know he did, right? He rode in and saved L.A. and all their funds. Everything's great. Everything's great. Well, he never got the chance to. If only. He was nearly kind of defeated in the primary. Right. Well, what did you guys think when you saw those ads and when you saw his candidacy?

[00:12:08] We've talked about the L.A. mayor's race twice, right? We had on Melanie Mason from Politico who was talking to us about that. She had this wonderful piece in Politico talking about that race in terms of its sort of cinematic qualities. And how it's so barbaric. Those AI ads. Right. Yeah, yeah. Fit into really – it was such a distinctively L.A. mayor's race.

[00:12:31] Because – I mean – but in cities like Seattle and New York and D.C. where you are in L.A., I mean a Republican isn't going to win running for mayor. So, I mean whatever. Like kind of a – a funny effort is all I would describe it as. I mean it was sort of a ridiculous effort. I thought it was remarkable when – Spencer Pratt did for a moment there. He was the king of X for a while.

[00:12:57] Like those AI-generated videos were like the talk of the town, right? And everybody was sort of paying attention to him. I think there was this – Megan Dow, you know, wrote a thing in The Atlantic about this populist revolt in L.A. That, you know, that Spencer Pratt was leading. And I as a political consultant here in Seattle was kind of rolling my eyes a bit.

[00:13:19] One, because I think what Spencer Pratt was actually saying about homelessness and addiction and street disorder was pretty cartoonish and clownish in my opinion. But also to David's point, there's no fucking way that like a Trumpist Republican is getting elected the fucking mayor of Los Angeles. It was a joke, right?

[00:13:42] And that so many people fell for it for a while, at least online, was kind of – I mean I found it kind of amusing. It seemed – it never seemed particularly likely to me that – I thought maybe he could get to the primary, but there was never any way he was going to get elected mayor of Los Angeles. And of course he didn't even make it through the primary. I will say this though. He tapped into something, right?

[00:14:07] He tapped into a core and a reservoir of public frustration about the kinds of street disorder issues related to homelessness that even in very, very progressive left-leaning cities like Los Angeles or Seattle or San Francisco. I mean particularly it's particularly – these issues are particularly fraught on the West Coast. But even in New York or Boston or Philly or wherever, right? Like these are live issues and the frustration about street disorder is real.

[00:14:35] Now, you're not going to elect people who are right-wing to solve them in these cities, at least not in the foreseeable future. But Emma, to your question, I do think he kind of – he tapped a vein. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. And also I will say just like in the Trump era of politics, I feel like one lesson that I've learned and that other reporters hopefully have learned,

[00:15:05] is that when you've got a former reality television star with some charisma saying things that might offend people on the left's sensibilities yet is somehow gaining in popularity and maybe it's confusing to you. So that's a time to pay attention. Yeah, pretty much.

[00:15:27] And I think that there's – I think that he was – you know, he placed third with like I think 26-ish percent of the vote. But even for like a registered Republican, no-name, hummingbird, like farmer, crystal salesman, you know, I don't know. I think that that – I think that that might say something about where the level of frustration is that he could even do that that well in such a blue city.

[00:15:57] But that was part of the reason why I thought, oh, wow, okay, there is this fight that cities are having that is interesting to me as a reporter, that people are very divided on how to solve homelessness or how to even talk about homelessness. And then as soon as I started getting into the history and finding some interesting stories from the past,

[00:16:23] especially this case out of New York City in the 80s, that's when I started thinking like, oh, there really could be something here that would lend itself to Longview's ethos, which is, you know, helping people understand the present by looking back at the past. So let's put a pin in the 1980s and return to that in a minute. But let's go back to the beginning of your story, at least, because there have always been homeless people.

[00:16:51] But you mentioned earlier there's this period where, say, Jack London gets jailed for vagrancy in the 1890s while he's visiting Niagara Falls. So what does that sort of time period look like? It's the beginning of your story. Yeah. So I was curious about trying to answer the question of, like, when did homelessness begin?

[00:17:17] Which really doesn't have a concrete answer because there have always been people ever since we've had cities. Like there's people living on the margins, living outdoors, you know, through economic circumstances or their own personal issues. But when I started reading histories about this problem, a lot of people started the story in America, in this, you know, post-Civil War, America is industrializing.

[00:17:45] And all of a sudden, there are all of these kind of rootless men, young, single, poor, riding the rails, and they became known as tramps and hobos. And they traveled the country looking for work. They would often congregate in major cities when that work either dried up or the, you know, harvesting season was over. They, you know, could be rowdy. There was a lot of alcohol involved.

[00:18:14] And what's interesting is that sociologists actually started to study these men and they would call them homeless. But what that word meant at the time was actually kind of rootless. Like they'd left their homes, their families, they'd left their communities and severed that tie, which was considered a very strange thing to do at the time.

[00:18:42] So to make a longer history shorter, over time, those jobs that these men were able to work, digging ditches, harvesting sugar beets, that sort of thing, that work dries up. And these men are left to grow old on these kind of bad sides of town called skid rows. And it's, you know, comes from a logging term. But yeah, which originates in Seattle. Right, right, right, right.

[00:19:09] The original skid row or skid row to Seattle, they rolled logs down the hill. Yeah, yeah. Good claims of fame. Yeah, right. And so it seems a lot of cities had these sides of town. They were places where, you know, if you had brothels or liquor stores or blood banks, even like that kind of stuff would congregate.

[00:19:30] And in cities, it seems like they were kind of treated like these disorder zones or these containment zones where, you know, things could be a little rougher. And police would, of course, like arrest people for a lot of like violent crime and that sort of thing. But it was a little bit more of like, you stay and keep that disorder over there.

[00:19:56] Don't go bother the rest of the city and we'll kind of be simpatico. And, you know, most of these men who weren't really living outside that much because housing was so cheap, you could get a, you know, a bed in a flophouse for a quarter or a dollar or something like that. A lot of these men, they were like older, they were white, they were disabled.

[00:20:23] And people really just kind of thought they would die off. And then that all starts to change when we get to the 1970s and 1980s. And cities around the country kind of realize that they have like a different sort of problem on their hands. Yeah. And before we get into the 70s and 80s, just thinking back to that period, right, I was, I'm not, I'm going to date myself.

[00:20:49] But to say I was young and in college in my, in the 80s. But, you know, even in the early 80s, there was still a kind of romantic, kind of romantic image of that older culture, riding the rails and hobos and that itinerant thing. And there were kids that we went to college, David and I both went to college with, you know, at our kind of bougie liberal arts college that would like still like hop a freight train to Oakland or whatever.

[00:21:18] To do the adventure of it, basically, because we were bohemians and we were looking for this kind of experience. And I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac when I was 17. And Kerouac doesn't present himself in that book as a homeless person per se or a tramp or hobo. But he was very much tapping into that ethos or culture and romanticizing it and saying, here we are. And like, we're young, hip, countercultural kids in the 50s.

[00:21:47] And we're riding the rails and we're traveling. It was hobo cosplay. In a way, yeah. We're smoking cigarette butts that we pick up off the street. And like, you know, and there was very much a sense in that book that this was something they were doing in a spirit of youthful adventure, I think. You know, as opposed to like we're beaten down like, you know, chronic inebriates or whatever. Right, right.

[00:22:13] But nonetheless, like that was the cultural vibe around this stuff, at least in the kind of world that David and I grew up in. Well, did that ever appeal to you guys? Like, did you ever consider? I totally wanted to. I'm a little surprised I never actually hopped a freight train and rode the rails because I wanted to. So I hitchhiked a lot in those days. And, you know, that feeling of freedom and just you stick out your thumb and you don't know if a serial killer is going to kill you or not. You know, but there's this kind of like spontaneity to it.

[00:22:43] And certainly just like Sandeep, I read On the Road and wanted to go to college in Oregon, partly for that reason. But, you know, it was this itinerant lifestyle that Kerouac was writing about. Obviously, like I didn't want to or think of myself as being a homeless person. But also I remember listening to that great Roger Miller song, King of the Road, you know, which is this ridiculously romantic take on having nothing.

[00:23:09] And, you know, the lyrics are like, I'm a man of means by no means. King of the road. It's a great song. You know, but when did that sort of whole romanticization of homelessness emerge? Because it's a crazy idea. Being homeless is not the greatest thing in the world. Like how could the middle class in America have come to romanticize it? Totally. Totally.

[00:23:34] No, it's like you would never in a million years think about having songs about a modern day homeless person, like exalting their lifestyles. My sense of the, yeah. The encampment, the genre of encampment songs. Right, right, right. And I think part of it was that there was, I think part of it was that these men were a blend of people, right?

[00:24:01] There were people who absolutely, like Jack London and these romantics, these writers, were choosing that lifestyle and were writing tales about it. And that influences, you know, the artwork and the songs and the romanticism that comes after it.

[00:24:23] There were also men that were like, were writing the rails and had lost limbs because they had fallen off of trains or they had been hassled by a train. I guess we call them like a security officer now. And there were people that were completely destitute also and were only living this lifestyle out of total necessity and not through any sort of veneer of romanticism.

[00:24:49] But I think it's because this group of people, this group contained some of those artists and some of those romantics that allowed it to kind of spread into this broader culture. And actually the artistic, I guess, exaltation of the lifestyle started to kind of begin as the lifestyle itself was fading out of fashion.

[00:25:13] So, you know, Hobos and Tramps, it's a little squishy, but like around 1880s, 1890s, like that, you know, into the 1900s, that really becomes quite popular. But by like 1920s, 1930s, like that starts, that lifestyle specifically starts to give way to what are often just called bums, right?

[00:25:39] People who stay put and who are living this sadder life. Thinking like in the 1900s, you know, there were people in the 19th century who were just kind of sitting around the pickle barrel, hanging out all day. And as you said, nobody really bugged them. Maybe they weren't really doing all that much. And then later we're sort of identifying that as more problematic and they become bums.

[00:26:08] I mean, so how does it go from vagrants and tramps and this romanticization to the idea of these folks as bums? Because certainly in the 1930s, it's not romanticization of an itinerant lifestyle. It's another economic shock where the country is actually pretty sympathetic to people that are looking for work and out of work. Totally, totally. And there was that like big, you know, economic shock.

[00:26:31] Our ideas about bums, there's this like incredible study of these men. I think they're called old men drunk and sober. But essentially, I think they were seen as like people who had to, you know, beg or have some small like, you know, day labor jobs to eke out this existence.

[00:26:57] But they weren't able after this like big economic crash to reorient themselves, right? Almost like how I think about with homelessness today, people I think may have a misunderstanding that like, you know, there's the chronically homeless. And then there's the people who become homeless for a short amount of time and then are able to kind of pull themselves out of it.

[00:27:19] And I think that, you know, society's views towards those two group of people is often, you know, quite different in part because the people who hang around end up causing problems, right? It's like causing longer problems for everybody else.

[00:27:34] And so in terms of like when work dried up for these men and they started hanging around in these cities, you know, they were seen as I think America has always had, you know, turns its nose up at people who don't work or can't work or, you know, they were seen as these kind of like drains on society.

[00:27:53] But because they were kept in these containment zones, because they were largely in one part of a city, I think they just kind of also escaped public view for a while until the 1970s and the 1980s started to change that. And we can kind of get into why that changed and also why the type of person changed, which I think is a big piece of it. Yeah, let's do that right now.

[00:28:21] I mean, let's talk a little bit about this evolution that happens in the 1970s and 80s where homelessness suddenly, you know, kind of more modern conception of the term suddenly starts to take root in the national consciousness.

[00:28:34] And you're suddenly seeing, you know, the rise of people panhandling in urban spaces and a lot of attention being paid to what seemingly is this spike in people living unsheltered on the streets of big American cities. I remember as a kid watching a 60 Minutes episode about what is this thing, this homelessness thing.

[00:29:03] It must have been when I was in high school in the early 1980s. Right. And so, yeah, there definitely is this moment where there's a turn in, I think, both the perception of homelessness, but also kind of the reality of what we're talking about when we're talking about homelessness. So, Emma, yeah, weigh in on that. No, that's interesting to hear about watching a news segment that's presenting it as this new thing.

[00:29:27] Because when I went back to look at news coverage and, you know, was reading New York Times articles about this phenomenon, it does have that flavor of people looking to the sides and looking at each other being like, what is going on? And, you know, it's just so interesting to think about that now because, yeah, I live in Washington, D.C.

[00:29:51] And homelessness almost just, like I was saying earlier, feels like this completely permanent. It's the background noise of your existence. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. So, there is – as to why people living on the streets seemed to become more of a thing in the late 70s and the early 80s and especially into the 80s, it's debated and argued about.

[00:30:18] But there's just trends that were all happening kind of at the same time that people generally agree on. So, one of those big trends is that housing, which used to be super cheap to get a really terrible room, right?

[00:30:36] Like we're talking maybe cockroaches or, you know, you're sleeping in these things called a cage hotel, which, you know, there was chicken wire over the top of your kind of space to make sure that people wouldn't crawl over the sides. It was pretty terrible, but it was really cheap. And so, people were able to find places to stay for a long time.

[00:31:01] That housing started to disappear because we had zoning codes and we thought maybe we should have some level of habitability here in our cities, which is very understandable. And yet, I think, had this consequence of getting rid of a lot of that cheap housing. So, that's one thing. Then, cities started looking at these Skid Row neighborhoods and thinking, oh, this actually might be some worthwhile property to develop, right?

[00:31:31] Like the Bowery in New York City, which was the city's Skid Row for years and years and years, is now like a pretty pricey place to rent. And so, there was a lot of like housing destruction and just redevelopment that contributed to it. And urban revitalization, right? The gentrification of, you know, in the 70s, American cities were in trouble and then suddenly there's this kind of rebirth of them. Yeah.

[00:31:58] But that has the consequence of displacing marginal people, right? Who are – as wealthy people move back into cities and you're the middle class or what have you. Totally.

[00:32:09] And I think a big thing about this story and I think a big thing about reporting in general is just like there are always these unintended or unseen consequences for any even positive social, political policy change, right? Like I think that it's interesting that like no one set out to get rid of all these slum housing.

[00:32:37] You know, a lot of that was motivated by humanitarian interests of like people should not be living this way. But it does have this unintended consequence of essentially getting rid of a lot of cheap housing. The other thing that's like a whole longer story is we had been emptying out for a while the nation's mental institutions.

[00:32:58] There were these high-profile abuses and one flew over the cuckoo's nest and we like thought – and there was also the advent of psychological drugs like that we thought would be able to cure a lot of the mental illness that we were seeing.

[00:33:14] So those hospitals, as they emptied out their beds, people start to notice that the people on the street seem anecdotally to be more mentally disturbed in general than the quote-unquote bum that they saw inhabiting Skid Row before where maybe that guy's problem was alcoholism.

[00:33:39] But you're starting to see people muttering, but you're starting to see people muttering to themselves, kind of the textbook behavior of people who seem mentally disturbed. Actually, there's this interesting thing I came across in my research where librarians started to have conferences with each other to discuss the disturbed patron because that was starting to be a thing.

[00:34:06] People were realizing that people who seemed crazy or mentally unwell were just suddenly inhabiting public spaces. And then as we got into the 80s, crack cocaine and drugs start to contribute to this as well. And the long and short of it is it seems like there is a more diverse group of people living on the street, like not just these older white men, but black men and women and even women with children.

[00:34:35] They seem to be more mentally disturbed than they had in the past. And activists, with the help of the help of the media, this was really interesting to me, start using the word homeless to describe this group of people. It had been, you know, vagrants often, sometimes bums if you're being impolite.

[00:35:00] But all of a sudden, activists are purposely choosing this word homeless because it points to a solution also, right? Like this group of people is homeless. The answer is give them some form of home. It's funny because on Nextdoor, I see some people still using the word vagrant, like digging up the word vagrant. Really? Yeah, it's funny.

[00:35:23] Well, let's get then to this fascinating story you tell about Joyce Brown and the New York Civil Liberties Union versus Mayor Ed Koch. This is in the 1980s. And Joyce Brown, this is in your first episode, right? She's living on a heating grate in New York City in the Upper East Side. This is the 1980s. And reportedly acting very strangely. She's yelling at people.

[00:35:49] She sometimes goes to the bathroom on the sidewalk and then becomes the center of this big turning point legal fight, it sounds like. So what happens? Yeah. So this woman, Joyce Brown, was living exactly, as you say, kind of a disturbed life on the sidewalk. The mayor of New York City at the time, Ed Koch, he's a Democrat, but he described himself as a liberal with sanity.

[00:36:17] Which I think is like, I guess, you know, Democrats might win today by adopting some of that branding. But he was kind of known as like this straight-talking, funny guy who felt a lot of responsibility for this budding crisis of people sleeping on the street.

[00:36:38] So what he decides to do, in addition to some of the other stuff that the city was doing, building shelters or making shelter, that sort of thing. He starts this program where, you know, a couple of vans were going to go out with a doctor and a nurse to find people who seemed to be, you know, losing it on the street and to take them to hospitals and involuntarily commit them.

[00:37:08] And what he finds is he starts this program, people are brought in, but sometimes they're not committed. Because the hospital at the time, the hospitals at the time, seemed to have this somewhat high bar for involuntary commitment. It was, it seems to have been interpreted as like, you're either immediately homicidal or immediately suicidal. Like, you're going to kill someone or you're going to kill yourself.

[00:37:38] Anything other than that, we're not going to admit them. And Ed Koch thought that that was stupid. He might, I think he used the word dumb to describe it. And so he basically, he didn't change the law. He did what many mayors past and present do, which is to say, well, the thing I want is actually legal.

[00:38:01] Which is to kind of change the standard a little bit and basically say, if a person is in danger in the foreseeable future, they should be admitted. So if someone, if it seems like someone is like really losing it, really not able to take care of themselves, that person should be committed to a hospital. So his program under these new guidelines picks up this woman, Joyce Brown, takes her to a hospital. I think it was Bellevue.

[00:38:32] And she is injected with an antipsychotic drug and I think with a sedative. So she passes out and I think the very next day, she finds a payphone at the hospital and she calls the ACLU.

[00:38:48] And it sparks this like amazing fight between the mayor and also her family is on the mayor's side and her and the ACLU side over, does she have the right to live on the street? Yeah, to walk out the door, right? And the mayor's side of this and her family's side of this is that she's clearly mentally ill. She's acting, doing these behaviors.

[00:39:18] She was exposing herself to people. Sometimes she'd yell at people, yell obscenities at people, that kind of stuff you do hear and see from mentally ill people on the streets of big American cities nowadays. It's fairly commonplace. But, you know, their argument was, you know, she needs to get help and we need to bring her inside and medicate her and help her.

[00:39:39] The ACLU and others, advocates for, you know, the burgeoning kind of universe of advocates for the homeless say, no, she has personal autonomy. She has the right to decide for herself how she conducts her life. And, you know, and if she wants to be out there on the street, she has a right to do that, right? She has a right to refuse medication. She doesn't want to take these medications, right? And this goes to court, right? There's this huge court battle.

[00:40:07] It becomes a kind of national cause celeb, right? Yeah. I didn't remember this from the time, but Thready DeBoer, you know, the cultural critic was a guest on our podcast. We had him on to talk about involuntary commitment and he brought up with us the Joyce Brown case. Oh, interesting. And the first time I started like looking back at it and it's fascinating. Like, so how does this battle resolve? Right.

[00:40:32] So, and one thing that I found particularly interesting is that the ACLU, you know, they're fighting for her rights. They also, at the time, were trying to make this broader point about homelessness where they like accused the mayor of only focusing on this because it was in the rich neighborhoods. And, you know, rather than locking people up, like provide more resources, that sort of thing.

[00:40:58] It's just really, when I was learning about this, I was like, oh my, this is so similar to the arguments that are happening today. You know, it's almost like we're in this, you know. Time warp. Totally. I was just like this, you know, take this out of the 1987 and this could be any big city right now. But what happens is, so there's a courtroom. This is argued at the hospital itself.

[00:41:25] And what I think helps propel Joyce Brown into some notoriety or some kind of national, becomes a national symbol, is she actually comes across pretty, like, put together in the courtroom and in media interviews. She, you know, there's all these recordings with her where she's this very petite 40-year-old African-American woman.

[00:41:55] And she comes across as, like, really proud and forceful. And she's kind of funny. And I think that really sways, you know, there's this debate going on over, like, how much rights should she have versus the city's rights and interest in committing her. And I think it's the fact that she's able to kind of speak for herself that propels this case to the level that it obtains,

[00:42:23] where actually, like, after all this shakes out, it seems, Ronald Reagan, like, references her as this weird example of American freedom. Because the long and short of the legal battle is that actually the city kind of won the argument in being able to commit her. But they lost the argument in being able to medicate her against her will.

[00:42:47] So without actually being able to medicate her, she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. They let her go. And she's released into the arms of a waiting public with her lawyers. And, you know, Ronald Reagan talks about her as, like, well, in America, you know, you can win your freedom to be on the sidewalk. She gives a speech at Harvard Law School, right? Like, after she's released. She's on 60 Minutes.

[00:43:16] And, yeah, and Donahue, she makes, like, all the major, you know, like, she's a major figure. Yeah. What happens to her? Well, the denouement, you want to tell her? Yeah. What's interesting is it's a little – it's hard to figure out exactly what happened to her because there's this really amazing bit of interview with Ed Koch that we don't end up including in the podcast.

[00:43:44] But, you know, the reporter, I think it's Morley Safer, says something of, like, well, you know, you say that she's crazy. But, you know, I talked to her and she seemed fine. And Ed Koch goes, that's what happens when you give a paranoid schizophrenic attention. Like, they rise to the occasion.

[00:44:01] But wait until all of that attention goes away and, you know, it will – you know, someone who has those narcissistic tendencies, it will be difficult for that person. So she kind of fell off the face of the earth. There was this New York Magazine reporter that tried to follow her a couple years, I think, after the case.

[00:44:27] And she, I think, had obtained housing but was panhandling and would sometimes swear at passersby and curse at them and be aggressive and then other times not, right? Because that, you know, sometimes she was okay, sometimes she wasn't. From what I can tell, it seems like she was maybe able to obtain some housing.

[00:44:54] It doesn't seem like she reconnected with her family. She had several sisters in New Jersey who loved her and who wanted her to be committed. They were on the city side. And, yeah, she died of a heart attack, I think, in her 50s. 58. She was 58 when she dies in 2005. Yeah.

[00:45:17] I think she ended up in an adult group home but refused medication, you know, continued to refuse her medication and was mentally ill. There she – I remember looking it up. I think she gets busted once for possession of heroin. Yeah, yeah. I remember reading that in some of my research. But, yeah, you know, it's a kind of a – you know, she dies young, estranged from her family, not treated for her mental illness.

[00:45:42] But, you know, I mean maybe she wasn't homeless but she was kind of pan – you know, she was sort of marginal in some marginal kind of liminal state or whatever. And all the media attention had died. She stopped talking to the media and her – the people that were trying to treat her were saying that the media attention had actually really been bad for her. I'm like, yeah. King of the road. We wouldn't romanticize her.

[00:46:04] And yet what I love about your story is I'm thinking – so does our feeling of sympathy for her on the ACLU side and her – does this come out of our romanticization of homelessness and that sense that this is in some ways about freedom and autonomy? Like, are those values kind of culturally rooted, do you think, and then express themselves in these battles in the 80s?

[00:46:31] Yeah, I think that that is a really great point and something that I hoped would be a subtext, I guess, of the series. Because what I found really interesting about that case, in addition to me changing my own mind about how I felt about it while reporting, which is always the best experience and I think like something that you kind of strive for. But so much of the conversation is about choice.

[00:47:01] Like, when she's interviewed, she talks about – I think she says it's like it's my body. Like, it's my choice. Like, this is how I want to live and, you know, an Ed Koch shouldn't have any say in it. And what's really interesting to me is – because that taps into, like, this deep-rooted American value, right?

[00:47:26] Like, we don't really think of ourselves as, like, a super paternalistic society in a lot of ways. What's really fascinating to me is that by the 2010s and I think in our modern-day conversations about homelessness – and I'm curious to hear what you guys think if this sounds true or not. It's inverted in a way.

[00:47:50] Like, when I – because all these court cases and all of these debates related to homelessness and encampment sweeps and what should we do about the problem of people living outside. Now, when I hear activists talk, it's about how they have no choice, about how people who are homeless, who are living in cities, they have nowhere else to go. Like, it's almost de-emphasized that they have any autonomy or choice in this at all.

[00:48:17] And actually, that idea underguards several pretty big court cases that were decided on the West Coast related to homelessness. Like, it's this interesting thing where choice is almost flipped on its head. But I'm curious what you guys make of that. That contradiction. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting.

[00:48:41] I think it is a contradiction because I think there is a kind of – I know I work – well, I don't work. But I am on the board of a major homeless shelter, housing, and behavioral health provider called DESC, which stands for Downtown Emergency Service Center. It started in the 1970s in Seattle, late 70s as the kind of – big cities used to have this, right?

[00:49:07] There used to be one central downtown mats on a floor kind of place. You would bring homeless people like that. This emerges in the late 70s and 80s as homelessness is taking on this new form. And there was a place called Baloney Joe's in Portland, right? Or, you know, DESC, the Morrison Hotel is where the big central shelter was. And if the cops picked up – came across somebody who was mentally ill on the streets or somebody who was, you know, just homeless but clearly needed some help,

[00:49:35] they would take them to the central shelter and drop them off, right? And that's what the homelessness response used to be back in the 80s for, you know, how the kind of urban authorities sort of dealt with the problems. And obviously DESC has now morphed into a major, you know, kind of, you know, nine-figure homeless services provider that is a pioneer of housing-first policies, which we should talk about, right? So –

[00:50:02] Baloney Joe, by the way, in Portland, I'm just remembering, Sandeep, there was this painting of this guy, Baloney Joe. And he was sort of a romantic homeless person, right? It's just – Yeah. As an aside. Yeah. It taps back in that old – I spent a night in Baloney Joe's. They used to have a program – this is when I was in college – where it was run by this kind of very charismatic homeless advocate in the 80s named Michael Stoops.

[00:50:26] And he ran this program where if you came down, he would kind of brief you up and then give you a quarter, and then you had to live on the streets of Portland for a weekend. Whoa. And, you know, with no money. And so me and a couple of friends did that, and it was a real experience. Yeah, I slept at Baloney Joe's and, you know, hung out with the drunk guys in the park and, you know, that kind of thing, right?

[00:50:49] And obviously it's a little bit of – it's both a bit of – it's kind of touristic in some sense, but also really eye-opening. Sure. There's a private high school in Seattle that has that same program. I think they discontinued it during COVID, though, because it just got too crazy. I'm surprised anybody does it now because it's also – it is kind of like dangerous and stuff.

[00:51:11] Well, it's also something that you and Tyra Banks, the supermodel, have in common because she – when she hosted the Tyra show, in addition to – she hosted America's Next Top Model, which is how I met her and fell in love with her.

[00:51:28] But when she hosted, I think, the Tyra show, she did that experiment, I think, and, like, I think was – yeah, she, like, made herself look dirty and sullen. And it's just very early 2000s, you know, daytime television, which I love. And I think she spent the day, I want to say, on Skid Row. So, I think she ate from garbage bins, if I'm remembering correctly.

[00:51:59] So, yeah, you're following the footsteps of the greats. There you go. Yeah, me and Tyra are like – we were like this, right? I don't know if you came across this in your reporting, but in the – it was in the late 80s, so maybe 80 – winter of 87 or 88, Michael Stoops, the guy in Portland who ran Bologna Joes, and the foremost homeless advocate in the country at the time was a guy named Mitch Snyder in Washington, D.C. Yes. The Society for Creative Nonviolence, or I can't remember what his word was.

[00:52:28] They spent a winter living outside in Washington, D.C. as a way to raise attention about homelessness. And as it happened, my friend from – who was more Michael Stoops' friend than I was. I knew him a bit, but my friend got to know him quite well.

[00:52:47] We were in D.C., and we ended up spending a night on a heating grate with Mitch Snyder and Michael Stoops outside the Library of Congress in – it must have been December of 88 maybe. And, yeah, it was a trip, like hanging out with these dudes. And Mitch Snyder, you know, sadly, he ended up committing suicide a few years later. You know, he dies. But anyway, yeah, that was my early experience.

[00:53:16] Mitch Snyder was one of the darlings that you must kill in any reporting project because I was really obsessed with him and the community for creative nonviolence. In part because, if I'm remembering correctly, and apologies to sullying the Mitch Snyder's name, but he just pulled estimates out of his ass for how many homeless people there are. Sure did, yeah.

[00:53:44] And it was amazing because I think at some point he was like, there are millions. There are 2.2 million Americans. And I think at some point he even admitted that, like, I think he went on Nightline or something and actually said that the numbers were meaningless. And he kind of provided them because, like, Americans just demand numbers.

[00:54:06] But it kind of set off this fight between advocates and the government over how bad this problem actually is, which is, of course, you can still see raging today. But, yeah, he was like such a character that unfortunately is on the cutting room floor. Yeah, major figure during that period. And he was kind of a force of nature, right?

[00:54:30] He was a kind of dedicated almost, you know, both he – like Michael Stoops, there was an early – these early homelessness advocates were in some sense, you know, they were almost like monks or saints. They really took up this cause. Like Michael Stoops lived at Bologna Joes in a room there with the homeless people. He paid himself $250 a month and that's what he lived on, right?

[00:54:58] Like they were – you know, Mitch Snyder kind of was similar to that, right? He lived a kind of life of, you know, enforced poverty, right? It's a very Christian – it's a very Christian life mission in a lot of ways. Emma, so one thing I really love about the way that you frame the series, it reminds me kind of of old school NPR in a lot of ways because – Thank you.

[00:55:24] You know, you're really setting up the problem really effectively and letting us make up our own minds by exploring this conflict between these two different ideas of freedom. Freedom of somebody who supposedly wants to live on the sidewalk and the freedom of everybody else who maybe wants to use that sidewalk and or wants to help that person differently and doesn't see it as so free and autonomous that they're living on a sidewalk.

[00:55:50] So I guess the question that we're always asking in our podcast is have cities, especially blue cities, taken this idea of personal autonomy too far in advocating, let's say, for housing first, which is something that we've gotten to a fair amount. But I'm not sure you reach a conclusion there. But in any case, I just wanted to present that question to you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's really nice to hear.

[00:56:15] And also, I think the reason we don't reach a conclusion, although I was always joking with Andy during the reporting process, he would be like, have you solved homelessness yet? And I'd be like, I'm just about to crack it. But yeah, I want people to have their own reactions to it, right?

[00:56:35] And I think that our goal was to kind of lay out the best case we could for those two versions of freedom and for things like housing first. And we don't touch on this a lot, but the philosophy of harm reduction obviously comes into this as well, of like, how much autonomy should you respect in an addicted, you know, a drug user, an addicted person's life? And at what point does that just trample on the freedoms of everyone else?

[00:57:04] Let's get to housing first, right? Because we just started talking about it. And you spend, obviously, the third episode of the three-part series kind of talking about the rise of this concept, housing first, which is the dominant concept for how we should address homelessness in blue jurisdictions, like places like Seattle, where I, as I said, I'm on the DSE board. It's the pioneer of housing first.

[00:57:30] And you spend a lot of time in that episode kind of talking about what it is, what the promise of it was, and then why maybe it didn't realize what its original, you know, progenitors, you know, promised it would do. So, Emma, talk a little bit about the, you know, what you unearthed about the rise of housing first and what happened. Sure, sure.

[00:57:52] So, for those who might not be familiar with the term, or I'm sure a lot of people are, but just in case, the housing first philosophy, as originally conceived, is this idea that for a homeless person, for a person who's on the street, the best intervention for them is to get them into housing without the, I guess, requirements or what they would call hurdles of requiring sobriety.

[00:58:22] Requiring enrollment in a jobs program of requiring changes in behavior first before you then qualify for getting some housing. And traditional housing first proponents really believe in this idea of permanent supportive housing. So, the idea that there's going to be an apartment with a subsidized rent that is yours so long as you can, you know, follow the lease agreement.

[00:58:48] And you will get help with, you know, finding a job and time management or even getting sober if that's something that you want. And that help will generally, you know, come to you. And the models are either, you know, building an apartment building or retrofitting existing apartments or, you know, finding you a unit somewhere in a building that exists.

[00:59:12] So, the story of housing first, it really starts with frustration with the typical model. It starts with a guy, Sam Simbaris, who was in New York City in the 90s. And he was watching people like Joyce Brown kind of bounce from, you know, hospital to the street to jail to hospital to the street to the hospital again.

[00:59:38] And he had this radical idea of what if we put the people who truly seem to need help the most, right? Like, we're talking about people who have severe mental health issues, who are potentially really addicted to alcohol or to drugs. What if we actually got them in an apartment and then tried, like, that would create the conditions for their lives to get better in these other ways.

[01:00:07] And so, there were these early studies that looked at this philosophy or looked at this idea and looked at how it worked and were pretty promising. Like, I get when I'm looking back and reading a lot of the hype around housing first, I totally understand why people were starting to get excited. Like, it seems like this radical thing that is going to solve or maybe really help solve street homelessness.

[01:00:35] Cities start, you know, really endorsing it. It's a bipartisan thing. Like, the Bush administration is into it because one of the promises was also that it would be cheaper. Because, yeah, paying for someone's, subsidizing someone's apartment potentially for months and years, sure, that costs money. But that person is normally cycling through emergency rooms. Ambulances cost money. You know, arresting someone costs money.

[01:01:04] And the idea and some of the studies suggested that it would actually be cheaper to provide housing to those people. So, a lot of our federal policy and state policy shifts in that direction. And it shifts away from these other ideas about treating addiction first or focusing on if mental illness is like the main thing that's got you on the street.

[01:01:30] And a lot of people, some of the people I talked to, you know, have essentially said that it was very difficult to actually broach any other method other than housing first for a while. Because it became this kind of, in their view, like a progressive dogma or this idea that would definitely work.

[01:01:52] And then, you know, these cities promised that they would eliminate chronic homelessness that obviously hasn't happened in a lot of different areas. And your answer as to why depends. And so, I'll kind of just lay out the different perspectives here for listeners. So, some people say the flaw was always with the housing first ethos.

[01:02:16] Because if you are severely addicted to fentanyl, especially these new lab-produced drugs that are crazy addictive, you know, just being in an apartment is not going to solve the actual problems in your life. And there have been some, like, high-profile or interesting reporting on, like, landlords coming to just totally trashed apartments or people being left to languish there, right?

[01:02:46] Where it became this thing of, like, housing only as opposed to housing first. So, that's one perspective. Like, the problem was the idea from the start. Then, other people think, well, like, housing has just, so many more people are becoming homeless that we just can't really build our way out of it, right? And so, the idea might be good, but rents are rising like crazy.

[01:03:10] And we are not able to keep pace with, like, what is actually needed. And if we just had more investment, then it would work. And then there are people who think, like, okay, all the places that said that they did housing first, they kind of did a bad job of it. And so, really, we just need to, like, recommit and put more money in that direction. And what seems to be – so, there's different perspectives.

[01:03:38] And people really debate what's right and what's wrong here. What seems to be the growing consensus in some cities over the past five years is, like, among even some progressives who really believe in housing first and among conservatives and among liberals, there does seem to be this growing acknowledgement that, hey, we might want to invest in that type of housing. What do we do right now?

[01:04:04] What do we do right now with the 60-person encampment that is near an elementary school? Like, there's been, I think, more maybe willingness for people on the progressive left to look at these problems that homelessness creates for other people and the ways that it kind of disrupts the freedoms of other people, as you were saying, David, earlier.

[01:04:30] And maybe, like – I don't know if you feel this way, too, but, like, for a while, I feel like people weren't really willing to talk about that explicitly. Not on the progressive left, they weren't. Right. It was verboten in Seattle media, really, almost, you know. Yeah, to talk about the social consequences.

[01:04:50] In the post – in that sort of immediate post-housing first Utah model, sort of 2016 to maybe 2022, I want to say, you know, it became almost verboten to – even – I heard one homelessness reporter one time say to me, because I was suggesting that they might want to look at mental health issues at the state and local level. And this person said, well, I cover homelessness. I don't cover mental health. Those are separate issues. We had a very progressive city council president.

[01:05:18] I remember her saying at one point that they were debating – there was really – there was a push in 2019 in Seattle. This is literally true. It sounds incredible to say it. But to make addiction an affirmative defense in municipal court for, say, if you were busted for shoplifting, you'd say, well, I'm addicted. So they'll let you go because, oh, well, you're addicted, so you had to shoplift.

[01:05:41] You know, like obviously it got proposed by some abolitionist public defense people and pushed by these very progressive city council members here. And then there was a massive public backlash and they very begrudgingly backed off doing that.

[01:05:56] But that was sort of the vibe, right, in kind of very progressive cities like Seattle or San Francisco back then, five, six, seven years ago, that we need to focus on what's best for – in our perspective to protect the autonomy and uphold the dignity of those who are on our streets.

[01:06:22] And obviously from that perspective, you know, busting these people or putting them in jail, you know, that's criminalizing homelessness. That's criminalizing poverty. What are you doing? Like that's so wrong. Like – and there was no willingness to consider the – I remember that city council member saying, well, you know, when you want to do this stuff with shoplifting, like what about the woman who's stealing baby formula to feed her child, right?

[01:06:48] As if that's what shoplifting in Seattle was, but in fact, no, it's junkies and tweakers who are like stealing from the target to go sell shit on the street to go buy some more fentanyl or whatever, right? Or meth, right? That's really what it is. And there was no willingness to acknowledge that aspect of it and the downstream consequences of that. Absolutely. That was – which is why there was a backlash, right, politically. Right. No, of course.

[01:07:15] And I'm curious – I have a couple questions off of that. I'm curious what changed for people to finally be able to kind of acknowledge some of these problems. I'm also curious, David, from your example of a reporter saying, you know, I don't cover mental illness. I cover homelessness. And maybe just like – I'm always interested in like how the media covers things and that was part of my interest in the story as well because I felt like the angle that we decided on was a underexplored.

[01:07:48] And I'm curious, like, do you think when it comes to, I guess, whatever you want to call it, like liberal bias in media, do you think people are thinking actively like, oh, I don't want to put these narratives out there because it's harmful?

[01:08:08] Or is it more even like under the surface than that, that like people aren't even having the thoughts to show the other side? Does that distinction make sense? Yeah, and I think, you know, different reporters approach this stuff differently. So I wouldn't paint with too broad a brush. That's one reporter, you know.

[01:08:30] But I do think there certainly has been around a 10- or 15-year period where social media has tended to kind of drive how people think about their reporting. And also there's been a shift towards a certain kind of one-sidedness. And so you wouldn't want to do a report that would piss off homeless services providers if that's your beat. And so if bringing up addiction or mental health issues, it became sort of verboten in the housing first period because it's like housing first.

[01:08:58] You don't talk about those things. I mean it was that – it's hard to imagine really now, but it was really that problematic. But I want to turn it back to you because what I love about your framing is you kind of, I think, made me think a lot about how we're sort of stuck in this fight between these two sides where they're not really listening to one another and we're not finding ways out of the bigger problem here.

[01:09:22] And I feel like on both sides in some ways there's a lack of willingness to acknowledge like what it might cost to actually like address this problem in a really substantive way. And, you know, ultimately it's Seattle's problem, it's Portland's problem, it's San Francisco's problem, it's New York's problem, it's Boston's problem. It's really a national problem. And the amount of money that these cities are able to dedicate towards this issue – I was just talking to Sandeep about this – it's nowhere near enough.

[01:09:46] If we want full wraparound housing first services for the entire population of homeless people in Seattle, we don't have nearly enough money here to do it or it would be very difficult to get that kind of funding. But if you at the federal level said, all right, it's going to cost us like, you know, billions and billions of dollars, that's a fraction of the $7 trillion federal budget.

[01:10:07] So maybe there's a way to think about this kind of globally as a national problem as opposed to seeing it as just a Seattle problem where, you know, you're constantly talking about, well, are these people really from Seattle? And do the people that are in Seattle – does everyone – can we afford to house everybody who's homeless in Seattle with wraparound services? Like, that is insanely expensive versus perhaps – it's not a Nazi or right-wing thought I'm having here. Perhaps it's cheaper to do that outside the city.

[01:10:32] But, like, we're just not able to think about outside our ideological boundaries at all and actually get serious about solving homelessness. You know, or it'll never be fully solved, but really trying to help people. And that's what's frustrating to me because I think our podcast is sort of left of center. Why are we even arguing about these things? Of course it's affecting the surrounding communities. And there's people shoplifting and there's crime occurring next to you. Like, how is that even a conversation? Of course that's happening. And also, of course, a lot of people are homeless.

[01:11:02] They're not going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and solve their own problems. They're worse off than your parents in their 90s when they need to be an old folks home even though they might not be that old. That's where they are and we just need to deal with that reality. Sorry, long rant. But, yeah. No, I love a rant. No, no, no. I think that, like – I think that there are things that both sides – I don't even like saying both sides.

[01:11:27] I like saying all sides because I actually, like, I really – there are always people – people's thoughts about this stuff is always more complicated and more kaleidoscopic than we think that it is. But in general, if I were to boil it down, I think that there are things that both sides miss about each other. And my goal is in listening to the podcast Street Fight, which everyone should find by searching on for the show Reflector.

[01:11:52] And my goal is that people will hear arguments that either they haven't considered before or give them a chance that they haven't considered before. So I think that people, just to really generalize, people on the left, I think, tend to downplay the personal mental illness or addiction or choice or just, like, the personal – both factors and choice that go into being homeless.

[01:12:21] And to kind of – to paint with too rosy of a picture as to the real problems that crop up when you've got a dozen people living outside with, like, no actual bathroom near a school. You know, and obviously, like, a lot of liberals and a lot of people on the left could admit that that's a problem.

[01:12:44] But there is this sanitized way that maybe some politicians talk about this problem. I kept running into the word unhoused neighbors when I was reading about this and reading speeches about this sort of thing.

[01:13:00] And I just – as a personal opinion, I feel like there is a way to both talk about the real problems that homelessness can create for other people while not being so vague in our wording or, like, I don't know, almost talking like you're talking to a child or something like that. And then – Yeah. It's like a Mr. Rogers phrase. Right. Our unhoused neighbors. Our unhoused neighbors.

[01:13:26] As opposed to this person who's screaming all day because they have severe untreated mental illness, for God's sakes. Totally. They're suffering. They're not just an unhoused – unhoused neighbors, kids. Totally. Totally. Like, it is insulting to the suffering of that person to – you know.

[01:13:44] But on the right, I think that now there is this idea that only punishment and only involuntary commitment when – it seems like there's a psychiatric bed shortage in general – that only bringing down the hammer will solve this problem. When I think that there are many arguments that people make about, like, the – you know, there's academics who've looked at why people become homelessness.

[01:14:13] And, like, regardless of where you put that needle, housing prices and rents prices are definitely part of that picture, it seems. And also just the idea that, like, of extreme personal responsibility and everyone feeling the intense punishment of the state in order to turn their life around. And, yeah, I think that's a blind spot on the right as well.

[01:14:40] I think it's interesting because, like, these liberal cities are just, like, so much run by liberals that it's kind of easier to see some of the blind spots on the left as opposed to the right. But, yeah, and in terms of money, I think that politicians have a lot of work to do to regain people's trust in certain places.

[01:15:07] Like, I mean, L.A., you look at some of the news stories that come out over – you know, there was an audit of homeless suspending and, like, $2 billion, billion with a B, was not accounted for because they – their processes for tracking that stuff seemed to be so poor.

[01:15:30] And, you know, you can find no limit of legitimate scandal, especially in California, in some of the ways that these agencies have been run. And, you know, if I'm a voter who is now being asked to send more funding, even to something that might work really well, I understand the hesitation. And, you know, I think – I don't know.

[01:15:59] I don't have an uplifting note to end that on, but I think it puts people in a really sticky place. And a lot of cities do seem to be trying to figure this out. So, like, it seems like there is now just a more willingness to try to have the carrot, I guess, of, like, investing in housing or making shelters better so that people do want to spend the night there.

[01:16:25] But also there is bringing back of the stick of, okay, we are going to have encampment sweeps. We are not going to allow you to live on the street corner for months on end, that sort of thing. And, yeah, that balance seems to be where we're at. Well, I think we're trying to find that – I think there's all sorts of – I would call them nascent experiments in trying to find some kind of middle ground between what has become this incredibly polarized minefield.

[01:16:55] As you were saying, Emma, like you've got the right that now basically wants to criminalize addiction and homelessness. You know, go back – kind of – they kind of want to go back to the bad old days of the war on drugs and some of this stuff. We actually had Devin Kurtz who was – who's at the Cicero Institute, this very conservative think tank.

[01:17:15] And he's the intellectual author of Donald Trump's executive order on homelessness that came out in July of last year that's titled Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets, right? So nothing touchy-feely about that, right? What's going on in the streets from their perspective is this coddling of crime and disorder in blue cities.

[01:17:38] But I will say you're right to say it's not two sides but all sides because when you actually sit down and talk to someone like Devin, David and I – You know, and I'm someone who's on the kind of – I am on the housing first side with some caveats about how we understand what housing first is. But there actually is some common ground that – to be found, right, if you actually kind of talk past the silos. But we don't do that nearly enough.

[01:18:04] And there are some promising nascent experiments, right, in cities like – I don't know, San Francisco, Philly, places like that. But we'll see – yeah, Denver, we'll see where they go. So Emma Pettit, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Emma, this is awesome. It's great to talk to you about this. This is such an interesting issue. Your three-part series on this at Reflector, which is part of Longview.

[01:18:29] Kind of confusing a little bit, but I don't quite get the distinction between Reflector and the other parts. The podcast is called Reflector and the three-part series is called Street Fight. It's a history of homelessness in America. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde. Thanks so much for listening to Blue City Blues. And yeah, that's it. That's the whole show.