So, my reading on homelessness went through it’s relentless list making (I’m currently reading, as I said, a ginormous summary of research in the field of homelessness) when it occurred to me that the big deal with fiscal zoning (a major element of zoning overall) is education. And educational funding is spent in ridiculously inefficient ways. There’s a fair amount of research showing that spending provides a cap on the expression of natural ability. Lots of money spent on educating someone without a great deal of inherent academic potential (as if such an entity were easily measured, but run with it) is wasted. This doubtless occurs with staggering frequency in the richest communities, and most funded schools.
A homogenous curriculum for heterogeneous students is incredibly stupid. The goal should be to have students pushing the limits of their current ability, continuously, in a variety of fields. This involves adaptive instruction. “oh, you did level x in field y with ease. Try level x+1 or x+2. But you showed no understanding whatsoever of level x in z. We’ll try x-1 or x-2 there.” Hopefully the latter part would happen basically never.
This thought led to the notion that my policy interests are primarily in things that are at the local/community level, though with higher level implications (I care about foreign policy, racial/ethnic and sexual minority policies, interstate commerce, and a variety of other such topics, but they aren’t where I feel I can make a difference). No real application to that thought immediately. Back to reading, hopefully less distracted.
Sweet, yet another quasi-liberal argument for magnet schools and school tracking!
Research in the field of homelessness? What kinds of things do people study?
Questions in homelessness
Well, there are a few interesting questions.
Why are people homeless? Who are the homeless? How can we effectively and efficiently intervene? How is housing different from brocolli? (ie, we don’t mobilize the powers of government to provide them with brocolli just because someone doesn’t consume it, so why should we for someone who doesn’t consume housing?). It is both surprising and not just how much people can write on this topic. =)
There is alot of work with statistics, and census/hud data and other national surveys. There’s also personal studies of individual homeless people.
The condensed form of the answers to the questions above as best I can tell and in my judgement follow. First, housing is different, because the absence of housing removes a protection from all sorts of nasty things: Violence, theft, contagion. And, in particular the last one means that the homeless can be a breeding ground for diseases to attack the rest of society (TB being a particularly popular example of this). And finally, they make people uncomfortable, bring property values down, etc.
As for why, people are homeless because finding a decent place to live is hard, and has become harder in recent times for a variety of reasons, and some people just are not capable of doing these difficult things. Particularly, declines in the middle class lead to declining quantities of property falling into disrepair and becoming suitable for low-rent residences. Faced with steeper rent, many people, particularly low-income people who are already facing difficult-to-meet rent burdens, become homeless.
Effective intervention is hard. I need to do more reading to be able to say anything useful at all about that, but it would seem that some combination of approaches designed to help people develop income sources, or pay those who provide them with housing, while attempting to correct the housing supply problem.
An example interesting effect to note in all this (just as an example) is that, unsurprisingly, when shelters are built, the sum of people in the shelters and on the streets increase. Because, people know they can stay in shelters for free or at least for cheap, and they’re paying through the nose to live in miserable, run-down ratholes, so why not just move out and take a shelter instead.
There’s also several models used to explain and to compare and contrast different options for programs to deal with homelessness. That’s a short summary from a newbie to the field 😉