To solve homelessness, we have to be precise in applying the goals of “housing first” and “affordable housing” to street dwellers’ grim situations. What we call homeless encampments are also open-air drug markets, some on a large scale.

Many focus on the rights of the campers and minimize the camps’ corrosive public effects: fires, blight, crime, addiction, mental anguish, and poverty. I understand that people debate which came first: homelessness and poverty followed by drug use and mental illness, or vice-versa. But either way, we cannot continue this way. Currently, unhoused people brain-damaged by drugs or otherwise seriously mentally ill can only be asked to accept treatment along with a type of housing, and if they refuse, as many do, they’re neither treated nor housed, because state law makes it almost impossible to require them to do what both they and the rest of the community needs. This must change.