Mike Johnston
speaker
226 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Mike Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
their neighborhood had access to services and those neighborhoods actually saw reductions in crime, not expansions.
That was the key for delivering something that was a win for the folks that were experiencing homelessness and a win for the neighbors who want to have sidewalks and streets they can walk their daughter on and still feel safe.
Mike?
Yeah, I have strong feelings about this because I think this is not just an ideological debate that you're entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts on this one.
And what we know is it factually does not work as well to try to force folks to get treatment before housing.
While we know that mental health and addiction can cause homelessness, we know that homelessness profoundly causes mental health and addiction, which is you could literally, you know, I've talked to doctors who will say if I were to design a perfect drug to help you survive homelessness.
Homelessness.
You need something who helps you stay up all night and be alert in case you're going to get jumped, that helps you be immune to cold and helps you go long stretches without eating.
That is essentially what fentanyl does.
It is a homelessness survival drug.
And so the reason why you want to get them into housing first is you stabilize and then allow you to focus on that addiction.
It is like asking someone to start physical therapy before you've closed the open wound on the side of their leg, right?
Like you have to first be able to triage it.
And by the way, for taxpayers, it's vastly more expensive because to try to go and get to someone on a street corner where they're still living in a tent and talk about job training.
Our social workers used to spend 75% of their time just trying to find the person to deliver the service because you couldn't find them day to day.
Once you have them housed, we can now bring in job training, bring in addiction support, bring in mental health services in a stable environment where they're open to receive them.
It's going to be poor.
Poorly spent taxpayer money if you do it the other way.
I always say if you don't think it's the case, let me know whether or not your drinking habits increased during COVID or not.
It turns out minor stresses add huge mental health and addiction changes in behavior.
Showing 121–140 of 226 · page 7 of 12
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