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Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcasts, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

I've been gone for a while. I was gone all last week. I'll tell you more about what I did on my winter vacation, maybe later in the week.

But now that I'm tanned, rested, and maybe ready, I figured we would counter program against so much of the craziness going on right now and go back to one of our mainstays, which is deep wonkery.

And one actually I should say in the early days of the Remnant, one of the most popular podcasts I did was actually with our next guest because we decided to go do a deep dive on an important public policy issue.

So we're going to do it again with the same guy.

So today we've got Steven Ide. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of the city journal.

His research focus on social policy issues, particularly homelessness and mentally and the mentally ill. His first book, Homelessness in America, the history and tragedy of an intractable social problem was published in June 22.

And I should have had him on when the book first came out, but I'm making up for it now. You can follow him on Twitter at Steven Ide on Twitter and Steven welcome back to the Remnant.

It's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

So again, I believe you were on episode 70 the last time you were on, which in the podcast years are like dog years, so that was a very long time ago.

Why don't we just sort of start with that was that was three years ago, something like that as homeless has gotten better or worse since that.

Well, I think we're still to some extent digging ourselves out from the pandemic and the after effects of the pandemic and the policy response to that.

If you look at the polls, it appeals to be just as bad as ever, particularly in the crisis places like California, you know, there are the problem cities in America most American cities are homelessness is a problem.

And then on the coast, it's a crisis. That was in the case in late 2010s and it's the case right now.

It's to some extent hard to understand exactly what's going on in the streets all the time it changes, it's hard to count.

But if you're out in California, if any of you out in California recently, it's just it's easy to strike up a conversation on the state of play with homelessness now as it was back last time I was on the Remnant.

One of the reasons why we wanted to have you back on is I've sort of I've sort of fell over backwards into this fascination with the city of Portland.

And then I got pulled into this long conversation that I've had are this long interest I've had in the sort of the the the transient culture of

specifically the Pacific Northwest, you know, going from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Vancouver.

And you pointed out to me that you actually did a history of this in your book about the differences between Obo's and

I'm using these terms as historical appellations not as the Jordan of things. So can you just sort of give like

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