Thread by @kyletalking

Don’t usually do *this* but, thread: Monday, SCOTUS debates the criminalization of homelessness. That means many folks are sounding off on the topic. I’ve spent 4 yrs covering this for @washingtonpost, and need to reality-check assumptions getting thrown around this week (1/x)

Specifically, my issue is an idea that underpins a lot of the convo, articulated here in a Post column by George Will. The piece makes a lot of points about the legal debate, appeals court reversals. Not a lawyer, not my wheelhouse, points could be valid? No idea. But this: (2/x)

Claiming "most" unsheltered people are mentally ill or have drug issues (no data cited) has to be unpacked. US official homeless pop is 650k. Casually claiming anything about more than 1/2 million people falls apart logically and rhetorically. Really? "Most"? (3/x)

If anyone made a broad claim about any other group like that, we wouldn't take it seriously. But that's how we treat the homeless: dismissively, or at best like they are helpless children lacking a strong paternalist guiding hand (4/x)

I struggle to think of another public policy debate that so uniformly rests on broad assumptions and then refuses to see that the homeless are . . . complex people? Adults? Fully functioning human beings in a terrible situation? (5/x)

Here let me say this: I've been in these encampments all over the country. There IS rampant mental illness and drug use (but also, people sleeping the street or a tent in your downtown are not making up the majority of that 650k). (6/x)

But when you assume it's all about drugs and mental health, many take the next step that the unsheltered have chosen this life so they can do drugs or let their mental health go untreated, that there is some personal irresponsibility at play. That's just not widely true. (7/x).

No one wants to be homeless. Full stop. It's terrible. Never really sleeping. Always on guard against attack and rape and harassment. The huge loneliness of having nowhere to go all day. The shame of asking for change and seeing most people walk by without looking at you (8/x).

Mental illness doesn't always drive people to the streets. Life on the streets tears down mental health very quickly. And drugs: all those empty hours, all those feelings about the situation-it could be seen as an easy and available fix for that. (9/x)

"My homelessness is not b/c of my drug use, my drug use is because of my homelessness," guy told me in downtown DC last month. In 2023, I was in Missouri. The state had passed a law criminalizing outdoor camping, same kind of law being debated Monday at SCOTUS (10/x)

Folks were using speed so they could stay up at night walking around-the only thing they legally COULD do, low-quality crap copped in a Sheetz parking lot, half the time puking it up or then hearing it was cut with fentanyl, worrying it wasn't cut with TOO much fentanyl. (11/x)

So no, drug users don't choose to be homeless so they can keep using drugs and have a good time. Mental illness is often the result, not the reason, of homelessness. (12/x)

Criminalization and forced encampment are grounded in the idea that you have force the unhoused to get treatment--as if it's easy for anyone to get a mental health treatment or a recovery bed even if they are housed and have a job (It's not). (13/x)

When the country debates homelessness, empathy and logic seem to get drowned out by easy stereotypes and assumptions. But I'm also not an expert, just sharing some thoughts that have come from listening to what people on the streets tell me. (14/x)

We're having this debate now in the highest court. But I just believe as a country, when we talk about homelessness, we're not really talking about what is happening, we're not seeing the whole picture. Okay, that's it from me (15/15).

So the idea