It takes funds from existing budgets and mandates how they have to be spent. In my county we already have enough trouble funding things and this would only make it harder to get some of those things funded. I am socialist asf and believe we absolutely need mental health, housing, substance abuse treatment, etc. but this wasn't the best way to do it.
Right sentiments, wrong execution. I voted against and hated that I was in the position of voting with people who are supporting garbage positions like pulling oneself up by one's nonexistent bootstraps... but that's the way it shook out.
"Of course, even if California is able to significantly reduce homelessness through expanded treatment and housing..."
That is a huge, huge, HUGE if. While I agree with pretty much all the stated goals of this bill I still voted against it because I did not believe anything it promised would actually be accomplished within 10 years, meanwhile it would suck significant funds out of county level mental health. So immediate pain, little chance of stated goals being met.
Why so pessimistic? Well consider the situation with veterans housing on the VA campus near UCLA. They have been trying to build a useful amount of housing there for decades, yet it just never seems to get done. There is a huge military cemetery there too. Dig it up and replant those people in Riverside (or wherever) and build veterans housing for thousands on that space. (The cemetery is probably owned by a different part of the Federal government, and good luck moving such a thing, in CA or elsewhere in the US.)
Or consider the fast rail system, which is going to reach LA and the Bay Area maybe 30 years from now. Maybe.
It is not lost on all liberals that stated goals in propositions that are never met, year, after year, after year, should not be rewarded with ever more money. I will know they are finally serious when they gut the state laws which allow the endless legal challenges to new construction, those are in large part why there are so many homeless in the first place.
"American Civil Liberties Unions in California and League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization."
As someone who works with these folks I gotta say the "one or the otherness" of the ACLU and LWV stance is super disheartening. We need both, tons of both. I love the idea of treating people in the community but I've had to face the fact that it can not be the only option for such a wide variety of situations, ailments, and needs. I worked on an ACT team (the current model of treatment for people coming out of state lock down facilities) and it is a crying shame how insufficient a resource it is to meet the needs of most. MH seems to still be stuck in the Regan years of "just send them home from the hospital and their families and communities will take care of them" and then refusing to pay for even the most basic interventions.
I remember when the facilities were closed in the 1970s when Reagan was governor of Calif. I was attending a big city university at the time. My dorm RA was doing an internship at a local MH facility. He was abruptly laid off. Soon after, "halfway houses," sprang up in the areas near the university. I still remember one woman who would walk around in her bathrobe and slippers carrying a stuffed toy and talking to herself. The campus had to remove dozens of folks for trespassing, even though they were not causing physical harm, but they should not have been there disrupting students and educators. The rollout to halfway houses was ill-conceived, poorly executed, tragic, and cruel.
Some of the blame in the philosophical shift of MH care lies with Ken Kesey and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." A novel partly based on Kesey's own experiences. But it was fiction, a subjective and creative exercise, and not a factual investigation. (For the further adventures of Ken Kesey post-release, read "The Electric KoolAid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.) The ACLU and the right-wing both siezed on "Cuckoo" as the "truth" of the evils of MH facilities, and the novel entered into the zeitgeist of the day. Some people were actually incarcerated for bogus reasons in the past. (Think "inheritance" and women wanting a divorce or autonomy -- many more examples abound.) But this was no reason to shut down an entire care system. Reagan was an evil, ill-informed asshole of a politician whose dubious legacy lives on.
Cuckoo was a novel but I've heard/seen plenty of way more abusive stuff in state hospitals since then. Lack of money for upkeep and lack of training/pay for staff at facilities is beyond criminal and abuse of patients will continue until we as a country take these issues as seriously as we do military equipment.
i was a student then in Kalamazoo which had the largest MH facility in MI … i worked at night in a bar & we had a constant inflow of unfortunate folks who no longer had a place to go …
We went to San Francisco last year and it was fine. We drove through some rougher areas where homeless people were but we never felt unsafe and we certainly didn’t come across needles or human waste. As usual Fox News is turning a difficult situation into a Democratic apocalypse. Hope this passes and relieves some of the burden on the city.
After which I assume Fox News will focus on rampant bike thefts or something else that is “apocalypse”
Excuse me for bitching, but I get mildly annoyed whenever I see buckets of money set aside for veterans, or anyone soliciting money specifically for veterans. Yes, I am aware that they "served their country" but so did I by spending my entire 42-year career working for city, county and state government in positions that directly served and benefited members of the public face-to-face, and I could have made twice as much money working in the private sector, but I chose not to. I also never got free or low-cost housing and medical care as a perk of my employment.
F'rinstance, some spent their time drinking massive amounts of alcohol, taking the downers they were giving Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD (before giving them bad conduct discharges) and tripping around in the desert because we really didn't know what else to do in the late-'70s version of a "jobs program" here in U.S. America... So it goes...
Some of the names have been omitted because fuggit...
I felt much the same way until I started working with some of these people one on one and the whole trope about "serving my country" and "sacrifice" usually boiled down to the majority being from economically challenged backgrounds with lots of abuse and addiction leading to a 17 year old with few options signing on the dotted line. They make crap and get housing in exchange and then get the shit kicked out of them in a million ways in the service until they are spit out to fend for themselves with no coping skills other than drugs and aggression.
A: It treats homelessness as a disease and not the by product of capitalist economics. They are broken, not the system.
B: Housing people 1st does two things. It ends their homelessness and makes it so much easier to find folks to deliver services.
The problem w/ Prop One is primarily is just shifting money around. It encourages counties to shift from creating stable affordable housing to treatment. It will pass because Liberal & Conservatives are disgusted at the mess those sleeping rough make. In the end it's an esthetic choice.
after hours of research, three zoom calls with fellow intersectional activists, and a confab with my queer mental health professional mentor, I voted against it, for the precise reasons noted above (locked facilities are life-threatening for marginalized folks). But I'm not sorry it's going to pass, because it's such a good measure except for a few things. Tough call.
Our town was the last of the 169 municipalities in Connecticut to enact a fair rent control board. It took a STATE LAW to force them to do it. And guess what is the number one local business by revenue?
What a wonderful plan and sorry to disagree with the nice organizations, but some of the homeless need institutional care and locked wards are necessary, Community based care can address many, but there is a place for institutions for they're own good.
When I lived in NYC there were severely mentally ill people living on the streets. I guess we can all thank Reagan for shuttering all the insane asylums, in favor of "community based" programs, which was a polite way of saying "I hope you do OK living on the streets with your severe paranoid schizophrenia, you bunch of lazy takers."
"...arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization."
Raging progressive guy here. This flat out has not worked. It is *not* more effective. The disproof is walking the streets in pain and a never ending psychotic nightmare. It has not worked since Ronald Reagan closed all (most) of the mental health institutions in the 1960s. The "community mental health services" never arrive, or are far less than what is needed, and being "voluntary", are basically ignored by the people who need it most.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I was a Red Cross Volunteer - back when they were called "Candy Stripers" for the striped smocks the girls wore. The boys like me had sport jackets with narrow blue stripes. Anyway, I worked for Dorthea Dix Mental Hospital in Raleigh, NC. Dix (1802-1887), according to Wikipedia, was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums in the late 19th century. In other words, she got the victims of schizophrenia, alcohol deliriums, acute and chronic psychosis and other clearly debilitating mental illnesses out of the ditches, underpasses, alleyways, trash heaps and the other places they were forced to live in, and got them into a hospital setting - a *hospital* not fucking Beldam asylum. Dix got people *out* of places like that. She wanted to treat mental illness as an *illness* - sound familiar?
Ok, so there I am, working in a dormitory setting that is not unlike the room from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' - except there was no Nurse Ratchet, no evil doctors, no "punishments", no uppity patients "treated" with shock therapy. It was a hospital ward. I was with the acute patients, and as was pointed out in that movie, most were there voluntarily. They were just very disturbed men who couldn't handle the real world. In *today's* real world, they would all be walking the streets, living in poverty, in despair and in pain, no "community mental health services" (that basically don't exist) to help them. Having experienced that old system, as created by Dorothea Dix, from over 50 years ago before the hospitals were closed and the patients dumped on the streets, I can tell you those kind of patients are no better off today - in fact, *way* worse off.
Now, the "chronics" - the ones so severely mentally ill that they simply cannot function in society. Where are they today? Walking the city streets, raging loudly and picking their skin for invisible spiders. OR... they are in prison, because our society has nowhere else to put them.
Prop 1 is doing the right thing, and I will die on this hill.
Dixmont State Hospital (originally the Department of the Insane in the Western Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh[3]) was a hospital located northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Built in 1862, Dixmont was once a state-of-the-art institution known for its highly self-sufficient and park-like campus, but a decline in funding for state hospitals and changing philosophies in psychiatric care caused the hospital to be closed in 1984. After more than two decades of abandonment, it was demolished in 2006. Planners originally wanted to build the institution in the city, but this idea was rejected by Dorothea Dix. Construction began in 1859, and opened in 1862. Dixmont was completely self-sustained from the beginning. It had its own farmlands, livestock, rail station, and post office. Also part of the facility was a water treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, and electricity generating facilities. They had their own butchers, bakers, farmhands, electricians, laborers, pipe fitters, botanists, chefs, and even a barber and a dentist.
DIx Hospital in Raleigh was much like that. The hospital grounds at one time included 2,354 acres, which were used for the hospital's farms, orchards, livestock, maintenance buildings, employee housing, and park grounds. The farm provided fresh food to the hospital kitchens, and gave occupational therapy to the patients. (They were paid for their work in credits to use at the commissaries.) They had a power plant, an auto maintenance shop, a gym and a movie theater. (I saw the Elvis movie "Speedway" there with the patients from my ward.) The whole idea was to recreate a small town that the patients lived in, not an "institution."
I don't vote for bond measures because I don't like putting things on a credit card that should be paid for by raising taxes on the rich. This was an exception and a no-brainer. I lived in SF for 5 years at the end of the nineties. I saw enough to change my mind forever about mental hospitals and "locked wards". They are not only needed, it's a sickening, cruel joke to pretend that the people in them are somehow having their rights violated. Without places where these poor people can be taken care of, the only right they have is to die on the streets slowly and horribly.
Of all the cruel things American society has done to its own less fortunate, closing state-run mental facilities was the worst. The most evil. The most heartless.
"Prop 1 would fund a $6.4 billion bond, of which $4.4 billion would go to sharply increasing the availability of substance abuse treatment,"
So more than two thirds of it isn't tackling homelessness at all.
"a last-minute change to Proposition 1 that allows counties to use the bond money for “locked facilities,” where patients cannot voluntarily leave."
And the rest can be used to build technically-not-prisons for locking up undesirables. So that's fun. /Fe
It takes funds from existing budgets and mandates how they have to be spent. In my county we already have enough trouble funding things and this would only make it harder to get some of those things funded. I am socialist asf and believe we absolutely need mental health, housing, substance abuse treatment, etc. but this wasn't the best way to do it.
Right sentiments, wrong execution. I voted against and hated that I was in the position of voting with people who are supporting garbage positions like pulling oneself up by one's nonexistent bootstraps... but that's the way it shook out.
"Of course, even if California is able to significantly reduce homelessness through expanded treatment and housing..."
That is a huge, huge, HUGE if. While I agree with pretty much all the stated goals of this bill I still voted against it because I did not believe anything it promised would actually be accomplished within 10 years, meanwhile it would suck significant funds out of county level mental health. So immediate pain, little chance of stated goals being met.
Why so pessimistic? Well consider the situation with veterans housing on the VA campus near UCLA. They have been trying to build a useful amount of housing there for decades, yet it just never seems to get done. There is a huge military cemetery there too. Dig it up and replant those people in Riverside (or wherever) and build veterans housing for thousands on that space. (The cemetery is probably owned by a different part of the Federal government, and good luck moving such a thing, in CA or elsewhere in the US.)
Or consider the fast rail system, which is going to reach LA and the Bay Area maybe 30 years from now. Maybe.
It is not lost on all liberals that stated goals in propositions that are never met, year, after year, after year, should not be rewarded with ever more money. I will know they are finally serious when they gut the state laws which allow the endless legal challenges to new construction, those are in large part why there are so many homeless in the first place.
"Locked facilities"? Are there no workhouses? The devil is in the details, once more.
"American Civil Liberties Unions in California and League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization."
As someone who works with these folks I gotta say the "one or the otherness" of the ACLU and LWV stance is super disheartening. We need both, tons of both. I love the idea of treating people in the community but I've had to face the fact that it can not be the only option for such a wide variety of situations, ailments, and needs. I worked on an ACT team (the current model of treatment for people coming out of state lock down facilities) and it is a crying shame how insufficient a resource it is to meet the needs of most. MH seems to still be stuck in the Regan years of "just send them home from the hospital and their families and communities will take care of them" and then refusing to pay for even the most basic interventions.
I remember when the facilities were closed in the 1970s when Reagan was governor of Calif. I was attending a big city university at the time. My dorm RA was doing an internship at a local MH facility. He was abruptly laid off. Soon after, "halfway houses," sprang up in the areas near the university. I still remember one woman who would walk around in her bathrobe and slippers carrying a stuffed toy and talking to herself. The campus had to remove dozens of folks for trespassing, even though they were not causing physical harm, but they should not have been there disrupting students and educators. The rollout to halfway houses was ill-conceived, poorly executed, tragic, and cruel.
Some of the blame in the philosophical shift of MH care lies with Ken Kesey and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." A novel partly based on Kesey's own experiences. But it was fiction, a subjective and creative exercise, and not a factual investigation. (For the further adventures of Ken Kesey post-release, read "The Electric KoolAid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.) The ACLU and the right-wing both siezed on "Cuckoo" as the "truth" of the evils of MH facilities, and the novel entered into the zeitgeist of the day. Some people were actually incarcerated for bogus reasons in the past. (Think "inheritance" and women wanting a divorce or autonomy -- many more examples abound.) But this was no reason to shut down an entire care system. Reagan was an evil, ill-informed asshole of a politician whose dubious legacy lives on.
My spouse's grandmother was not only involuntarialy comitted, but lobomized for being an unhappy housewife.
:-( Something treatable today, no doubt.
My fourth great-grandmother was committed for having (what appeared to be) age-related dementia.
Cuckoo was a novel but I've heard/seen plenty of way more abusive stuff in state hospitals since then. Lack of money for upkeep and lack of training/pay for staff at facilities is beyond criminal and abuse of patients will continue until we as a country take these issues as seriously as we do military equipment.
And corporate profits... I expect MH hospitals will be outsourced and monetized.
Vulture capitalists are often behind facilitating the worst excesses of abuse in institutions.
i was a student then in Kalamazoo which had the largest MH facility in MI … i worked at night in a bar & we had a constant inflow of unfortunate folks who no longer had a place to go …
I remember the staff at Camarillo State Hospital painting the lawn green before his visit so it would look better manicured.
𝘛𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘵 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 has entered the chat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies
We went to San Francisco last year and it was fine. We drove through some rougher areas where homeless people were but we never felt unsafe and we certainly didn’t come across needles or human waste. As usual Fox News is turning a difficult situation into a Democratic apocalypse. Hope this passes and relieves some of the burden on the city.
After which I assume Fox News will focus on rampant bike thefts or something else that is “apocalypse”
same
Excuse me for bitching, but I get mildly annoyed whenever I see buckets of money set aside for veterans, or anyone soliciting money specifically for veterans. Yes, I am aware that they "served their country" but so did I by spending my entire 42-year career working for city, county and state government in positions that directly served and benefited members of the public face-to-face, and I could have made twice as much money working in the private sector, but I chose not to. I also never got free or low-cost housing and medical care as a perk of my employment.
And not all veterans are "heroes"...
F'rinstance, some spent their time drinking massive amounts of alcohol, taking the downers they were giving Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD (before giving them bad conduct discharges) and tripping around in the desert because we really didn't know what else to do in the late-'70s version of a "jobs program" here in U.S. America... So it goes...
Some of the names have been omitted because fuggit...
I felt much the same way until I started working with some of these people one on one and the whole trope about "serving my country" and "sacrifice" usually boiled down to the majority being from economically challenged backgrounds with lots of abuse and addiction leading to a 17 year old with few options signing on the dotted line. They make crap and get housing in exchange and then get the shit kicked out of them in a million ways in the service until they are spit out to fend for themselves with no coping skills other than drugs and aggression.
Prop 1 is wrong because
A: It treats homelessness as a disease and not the by product of capitalist economics. They are broken, not the system.
B: Housing people 1st does two things. It ends their homelessness and makes it so much easier to find folks to deliver services.
The problem w/ Prop One is primarily is just shifting money around. It encourages counties to shift from creating stable affordable housing to treatment. It will pass because Liberal & Conservatives are disgusted at the mess those sleeping rough make. In the end it's an esthetic choice.
It makes me uneasy that Republicans are turning out in such large numbers for the primaries.
after hours of research, three zoom calls with fellow intersectional activists, and a confab with my queer mental health professional mentor, I voted against it, for the precise reasons noted above (locked facilities are life-threatening for marginalized folks). But I'm not sorry it's going to pass, because it's such a good measure except for a few things. Tough call.
Our town was the last of the 169 municipalities in Connecticut to enact a fair rent control board. It took a STATE LAW to force them to do it. And guess what is the number one local business by revenue?
"Billionaires" need your help, too.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1767991218401665525 ---
MacCallum: Any closer to getting a bond in the real estate case?
Habba: Yeah, no, unfortunately I can't speak to that. That is privileged.
"Privileged?!?" Well, why not just declassify it with your mind like your boss?
What a wonderful plan and sorry to disagree with the nice organizations, but some of the homeless need institutional care and locked wards are necessary, Community based care can address many, but there is a place for institutions for they're own good.
When I lived in NYC there were severely mentally ill people living on the streets. I guess we can all thank Reagan for shuttering all the insane asylums, in favor of "community based" programs, which was a polite way of saying "I hope you do OK living on the streets with your severe paranoid schizophrenia, you bunch of lazy takers."
"...arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization."
Raging progressive guy here. This flat out has not worked. It is *not* more effective. The disproof is walking the streets in pain and a never ending psychotic nightmare. It has not worked since Ronald Reagan closed all (most) of the mental health institutions in the 1960s. The "community mental health services" never arrive, or are far less than what is needed, and being "voluntary", are basically ignored by the people who need it most.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I was a Red Cross Volunteer - back when they were called "Candy Stripers" for the striped smocks the girls wore. The boys like me had sport jackets with narrow blue stripes. Anyway, I worked for Dorthea Dix Mental Hospital in Raleigh, NC. Dix (1802-1887), according to Wikipedia, was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums in the late 19th century. In other words, she got the victims of schizophrenia, alcohol deliriums, acute and chronic psychosis and other clearly debilitating mental illnesses out of the ditches, underpasses, alleyways, trash heaps and the other places they were forced to live in, and got them into a hospital setting - a *hospital* not fucking Beldam asylum. Dix got people *out* of places like that. She wanted to treat mental illness as an *illness* - sound familiar?
Ok, so there I am, working in a dormitory setting that is not unlike the room from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' - except there was no Nurse Ratchet, no evil doctors, no "punishments", no uppity patients "treated" with shock therapy. It was a hospital ward. I was with the acute patients, and as was pointed out in that movie, most were there voluntarily. They were just very disturbed men who couldn't handle the real world. In *today's* real world, they would all be walking the streets, living in poverty, in despair and in pain, no "community mental health services" (that basically don't exist) to help them. Having experienced that old system, as created by Dorothea Dix, from over 50 years ago before the hospitals were closed and the patients dumped on the streets, I can tell you those kind of patients are no better off today - in fact, *way* worse off.
Now, the "chronics" - the ones so severely mentally ill that they simply cannot function in society. Where are they today? Walking the city streets, raging loudly and picking their skin for invisible spiders. OR... they are in prison, because our society has nowhere else to put them.
Prop 1 is doing the right thing, and I will die on this hill.
Dixmont State Hospital (originally the Department of the Insane in the Western Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh[3]) was a hospital located northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Built in 1862, Dixmont was once a state-of-the-art institution known for its highly self-sufficient and park-like campus, but a decline in funding for state hospitals and changing philosophies in psychiatric care caused the hospital to be closed in 1984. After more than two decades of abandonment, it was demolished in 2006. Planners originally wanted to build the institution in the city, but this idea was rejected by Dorothea Dix. Construction began in 1859, and opened in 1862. Dixmont was completely self-sustained from the beginning. It had its own farmlands, livestock, rail station, and post office. Also part of the facility was a water treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, and electricity generating facilities. They had their own butchers, bakers, farmhands, electricians, laborers, pipe fitters, botanists, chefs, and even a barber and a dentist.
DIx Hospital in Raleigh was much like that. The hospital grounds at one time included 2,354 acres, which were used for the hospital's farms, orchards, livestock, maintenance buildings, employee housing, and park grounds. The farm provided fresh food to the hospital kitchens, and gave occupational therapy to the patients. (They were paid for their work in credits to use at the commissaries.) They had a power plant, an auto maintenance shop, a gym and a movie theater. (I saw the Elvis movie "Speedway" there with the patients from my ward.) The whole idea was to recreate a small town that the patients lived in, not an "institution."
I don't vote for bond measures because I don't like putting things on a credit card that should be paid for by raising taxes on the rich. This was an exception and a no-brainer. I lived in SF for 5 years at the end of the nineties. I saw enough to change my mind forever about mental hospitals and "locked wards". They are not only needed, it's a sickening, cruel joke to pretend that the people in them are somehow having their rights violated. Without places where these poor people can be taken care of, the only right they have is to die on the streets slowly and horribly.
Of all the cruel things American society has done to its own less fortunate, closing state-run mental facilities was the worst. The most evil. The most heartless.
I should have read down- you are far more persuasive and I agree 100%.
I voted against Prop 1, largely because of the ACLU's opposition. That 'locked facilities' stuff was nothing I could swallow.