[HN Gopher] California spent $17B on homelessness - it's not wor...
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California spent $17B on homelessness - it's not working
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 288 points
Date : 2023-06-02 07:27 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| kyleblarson wrote:
| The homeless industrial grift marches on.
| rottencupcakes wrote:
| Homelessness is a failure of the Federal government that nobody
| there is even willing to talk about.
|
| This can't be solved at a local or state level in a country with
| unrestricted freedom of movement.
| zacharytelschow wrote:
| If it's a federal failure why are the homeless highly
| concentrated in certain areas?
| kube-system wrote:
| People and resources are concentrated in certain areas
|
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yes, because obviously Houston has just as big a problem as
| SF.
| kube-system wrote:
| Of course, not all cities experience homelessness at the
| same rate. However, Houston is in the top 25 cities for
| the total number of homelessness.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Houston is the fourth biggest city in the country. If
| it's only in the top 25 for some bad metric, that's great
| news.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, I agree. Despite Houston being one of the top cities
| in the US for homelessness, they have a slightly lower
| rate of homelessness than the US average. However, their
| homelessness rate is higher than the Texas average.
| sshconnection wrote:
| In sprawling cities like Houston you can also just not
| see that area of town. In a dense place like SF, it's
| harder to avoid.
| sshconnection wrote:
| Certain areas are inherently easier to be homeless in,
| regardless of local programs.
|
| Try sleeping outside for a year in Phoenix or in Minneapolis.
| Try getting resources in a sprawling suburb without access to
| a car. It seems clear that SF, with its dense, walkable
| layout, access to public transit, and year round moderate
| climate, would be vastly preferable to most areas of the US.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Because certain areas of the country have better services for
| homeless people, because certain areas are livable/hospitable
| year-round, because some places bus homeless people to other
| areas? Probably mostly the first 2 reasons but the third
| doesn't help.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I don't think the feds are to blame.
|
| SF and similar CA cities have set up a program that encourages
| people to move there because it makes being "homeless" an
| actual possible lifestyle choice. Even an enjoyable one.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| Hmm. I wonder if you could say "if someone becomes homeless
| in your locality, your locality has failed them". And then
| rate localities/states by their net loss of citizens that
| have fallen "outside society". Then begin incentivizing
| communities to fix these problems. There's only so much a
| local community can do with limited funds, but while I'm sure
| the majority of homeless in California are Californian... I
| would love other states to take ownership of citizens they
| export/extrude. :s
| atdrummond wrote:
| I agree. From my research, Portugal's drug assistance
| programmes for the homeless are quite effective.
|
| For those in more of a poverty trap situation, Finland has
| done quite a good job finding the right set of policies for
| their country to bring levels down so far that most
| Americans would consider them to have "solved"
| homelessness.[1]
|
| https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-
| homeless-...
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Are you aware of this?
|
| _Reagan's Legacy: Homelessness in America_
|
| https://shelterforce.org/2004/05/01/reagans-legacy-
| homelessn...
| atdrummond wrote:
| Yes. States aren't powerless to implement mental health
| requirements and programmes though. It is a cop-out to
| suggest that states and cities don't use the full breadth
| of their legislative powers because the federal government
| made a bad policy decision over 4 decades ago.
| [deleted]
| youreincorrect wrote:
| Reagan hasn't been governor of California or president of
| the US for a long time.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That's why it's called a "legacy". It lingers after
| you've been gone.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Democrats must be remarkably ineffective to have someone
| that long ago still disrupting them after decades of
| unquestioned control.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Democrats are largely liberal capitalists. They don't
| have solutions to this either.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| The Feds may not be "to blame". But it's hard to see how
| individual states can solve this problem.
|
| Any program by any state that helps the homeless in a country
| where you legally cannot create state level borders (and with
| the homeless you can't establish residency by definition)
| would immediately draw homeless people across the country,
| especially since the homeless strategy in many states is to
| pay for one way bus tickets to a different state, and quickly
| overwhelm and undermine what could otherwise have been a
| successful program.
|
| Any successful program must be funded and implemented at the
| Federal level.
| roenxi wrote:
| Why? Is it illegal to discriminate based on place of birth?
|
| It seems like it'd be politically palatable to allow places to
| run homeless programs that are only available to locals. There
| isn't a downside for anyone.
| user- wrote:
| Is this a real question?
|
| How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in
| a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not
| a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
| roenxi wrote:
| Quite serious. It isn't like free movement stops people
| from implementing a local plan against homelessness.
|
| > How will you define a local? What happens if someone
| lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if
| theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an
| immigrant?
|
| I'm not sure what point you're wanting to make here, but
| yes. If a group of locals wants to solve homelessness in
| their area they will need to decide on answers to those
| questions. Frankly they aren't hard questions. Born in a
| geographic area or owned a home for 5+ years, yes, no, yes
| if they owned a home locally.
|
| How do define who gets to be a citizen for a federal
| response to homelessness? It faces exactly the same
| problems. America can't afford to provide welfare for all
| of Asia.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Two issues.
|
| First, homeless people tend to be much less likely to
| have the wherewithal to prove residency, either due to
| substance problems, difficulty navigating bureaucracy, or
| just not having the money to chase down paperwork or a
| safe place to store it. So hurdles like "being local",
| essentially whatever it means, could prove to be a huge
| barrier to uptake of your programs.
|
| Second, "solving homelessness" for just one subset of
| homeless people may not actually provide the benefit you
| hope for. You might still have tent cities, RV
| encampments, people using drugs outdoors, etc. Now the
| people doing that are from just past city limits and
| entitled to no support.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Let me just quality a bit further: homelessness is a failure of
| the neoliberal ideology (land free markets/privatization never
| worked, from the enclosures [1] to modern times, see Georgism
| for a solution [2]) and further a failure of the metaphysics of
| meritocracy based in desert-people's belief "by the sweat of
| your brow you will eat your food until you return to the
| ground", which simply isn't the case today, and it certainly
| won't be the case in a few decades when all the jobs will be
| gone forever, hopefully.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Enclosure worked perfectly well as it consolidated productive
| land in the hands of the powerful without the attached
| commoners that they were at least notionally responsible for.
| I cannot think of a greater disenfrachisement in the Western
| world other than chattel slavery.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Homelessness has been on the downtrend for quite a few
| decades in the US. There is 0 countries in this world who
| have solved homelessness by the way.
|
| I don't think you're correct.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Not sure how much of a downtrend, seems rather stable [1].
| There are also 0 countries that implement Georgist policies
| and most of the countries in the world are directly
| neoliberal or neoliberal-bent, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia
| [2], and friends included.
|
| Perhaps I am not correct, but what do you think will happen
| in a few years when we will have a 100 GB neural model able
| to drive any car in any environment, effectively
| obliterating 200+ million jobs worldwide? Fairly certain,
| if we keep the same policies and the same belief-system,
| homelessness will trend rather high.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-
| number-...
|
| [2] 2018, Abdullah Al-Beraidi, "The Trap of Neoliberalism
| for Gulf Cooperation Council Countries",
| https://online.ucpress.edu/caa/article-
| abstract/11/4/63/2579... PDF: https://caus.org.lb/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/01/The-Trap-of-N...
| stale2002 wrote:
| Ah, the Georgism fans. Thinking that every single problem
| in the world can be solved via a land value tax.
|
| It is actually one of the few groups I've found that are
| worse than the socialist class reductionists, who think
| that every problem exists "because capitalism".
|
| Yes, a land value tax can be a useful policy. But it
| simply has little relevance to the topic of people who
| are homeless because of mental issues.
|
| And you bringing up georgism demonstrates a lack of
| engagement on the issue, and instead an attempt to shoe
| horn in your favorite ideology into any possible issue.
| boucher wrote:
| Conflating homelessness with mental issues is as much a
| lack of real engagement on the issue as your critique of
| the OP.
|
| Homelessness is primarily a function of housing costs, so
| I'd suggest the land value tax is a lot more relevant
| than you think.
| stale2002 wrote:
| If it really is mostly housing costs, do you understand
| how easy of a problem that is to solve?
|
| Just buy all the homeless people bus tickets to somewhere
| cheap in the middle of nowhere and pay the cheap rent for
| them there.
|
| Problem solved. And easily solvable using the existing
| over inflated costs we pay now.
|
| We, of course, don't do that, because it isn't going to
| solve the problem.
| jiscariot wrote:
| If we're going to put the SF homeless problem on "neoliberal
| ideology", we should also give "neoliberal ideology" (e.g.
| free markets/trade/globalization) credit for lifting almost a
| billion people out of poverty in developing nations (mainly
| China, India) in the 00s.
| tmnvix wrote:
| On that note, we should also give communism credit for
| lifting billions out of poverty in China
| gre wrote:
| Maybe China is on to something.
|
| Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty - New Report Looks at
| Lessons from China's Experience
|
| https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
|
| 90% of families in China own their own home
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/
| RavlaAlvar wrote:
| Sure. Common Chinese factory workers live in 6-12 people
| dormitory. Homeless people get evicted from the capital city.
| Major city have rule in place to prevent non local people
| buying property, Let's do that.
| erickf1 wrote:
| An expense chart showing how that $17B was spent would be
| interesting to everyone reading the article. It would also keep
| the government accountable to the people on how their taxes are
| spent.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > has about half of the nation's unsheltered homeless
|
| How many are from California and how many were given a bus pass
| to California by a government content to move the homeless around
| or on their own accord made their way to California as it has
| some of the best services?
|
| How many are the same homeless people and how many are new
| homeless people who have replaced the old homeless people, making
| it appear that no progress has been made, but in reality there
| may just be greater need?
| atdrummond wrote:
| From the many hundreds of homeless people I've met in SF,
| there's been a massive increase of out-of-state movement. That
| said, they seem to mostly come of their own volition - they
| realize the combination of the nice weather and massive
| resources available means they have a pretty maintainable
| lifestyle.
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _The number of homeless people in California grew about 50%
| between 2014 and 2022. The state, which accounts for 12% of the
| U.S. population, has about half of the nation's unsheltered
| homeless, an estimated 115,000 people_
|
| More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high
| percentage of the _chronically homeless_ who likely skew those
| stats pretty badly.
|
| My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just _the
| presenting problem._ I think California is essentially our
| dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and
| California can 't solve it alone.
|
| Edit: In case it needs to be said again, the primary root cause
| is a nationwide shortage of appropriate housing options.
| katbyte wrote:
| That's about what happens in Canada, Vancouver gets the
| homeless fromt he entire country, sometimes bussed, but mostly
| because the climate is hospitable all year round
| jimt1234 wrote:
| > My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just
| the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our
| dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and
| California can't solve it alone.
|
| THIS ^^^
| apsec112 wrote:
| There is a very very strong correlation between homelessness in a
| state and housing prices, far more than any other factor:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qz9GvoPbnFwGrHHQB/visible-ho...
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| But not causation.
|
| There's also a strong correlation between homeless people and
| parking garage density.
|
| Housing prices are high where there are people. People are
| homeless where there are people. It comes with the territory.
| Throw in amazing weather and states bussing their homeless to
| CA and it becomes a very attractive proposition for someone
| without a home.
|
| If there was a correlation then sending the homeless to
| Arkansas would solve the problem, but it wouldn't. They'd just
| be homeless in the woods.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > Housing prices are high where there are people.
|
| Population density and price don't directly correlate. I'm
| sure you can think of some expensive low density areas.
|
| Shipping people to lower cost of living locations can be a
| fix, especially if they have family nearby. It's very hard to
| afford some locations without a high pay job.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > But not causation.
|
| Evidence for this claim?
| bombcar wrote:
| _taps the sign_ https://xkcd.com/1138/
|
| There are always more homeless people in the city than in
| tiny rural towns, because the homeless people in the tiny
| rural towns move toward the city or get chased out.
|
| It's also true that there are numbers of people in those far
| rural communities that would _end up_ quite homeless if you
| forced them into the city. Imagine someone on social security
| living in a dilapidated trailer on some worthless piece of
| land.
|
| And also homeless people, _even the mentally ill and drug
| addicted_ are not stupid. They will go where they get the
| least hassle and the most benefit. And it 's widely known
| that California is the place to be.
| bluGill wrote:
| The the tiny rural towns take care of their own. There are
| no homeless because everyone knows "joe" is messed up, and
| so they ignore him living in an otherwise abandoned house
| (they are around) thus making "Joe" not homeless, and plant
| a larger garden so he can harvest something. They won't
| allow someone new move in, but Joe grew up there and so
| they let him continue to live there. In the city you can't
| know everyone and so it is much easier to ignore the
| homeless in a way that doesn't help the homeless.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I don't completely agree. From talking with them, a fair
| number of the homeless in SF are from Lake County and the
| Central Valley. Went to a shitty school with no job
| prospects. started on crank. ended up in SF because this
| is a place where a methhead can enjoy their lifestyle and
| get by.
| shuckles wrote:
| Hey, that's not fair to Humboldt!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Checks out. Rich places have lots more resources to give to
| homeless people.
| legitster wrote:
| 1. We need more public housing.
|
| 2. The housing has to be slightly worse than the lowest quality
| housing available on the market. (Think SROs or dormitory style).
|
| 3. You have to make access to _some_ of the housing
| unconditional.
|
| This _was_ the solution in most cities until large bipartisan
| pushes in the late 90s sought to end "projects" and "slums".
|
| I totally understand trying to make efforts to also solve drug
| and crime related problems. Or even get people into nice houses
| or jobs. But it seems like all for all of the money we are
| refusing to spend on actual homes, we may as well move the drugs
| and crime indoors and off the streets.
| Pinegulf wrote:
| https://archive.is/SX1Jq
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Not an expert, but I like this as _one_ potential solution:
| https://palletshelter.com/homelessness/
|
| In my area, the city council is talking about spending up to
| *$400K per unit* to help provide shelter for the homeless, which
| is insane:
| https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story...
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| option wrote:
| This is about $147,000 per homeless person (assuming recent
| number of 115,000 of them in the state).
|
| Who is going to lose their job/ go to jail for wasting $17B of CA
| taxpayers money?
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Government spend X on problem, it doesn't work and actually gets
| worse. In other news, water is wet. More at all.
|
| Disclaimer: this doesn't apply to when government is trying to
| kill people outright. Government is extremely efficient at
| killing people on purpose, and not much else.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If only they'd spend it on trying to end homelessness instead.
| jerojero wrote:
| It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time,
| yet still unable to afford rent.
|
| I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in
| addressing the housing market; which in California is really
| really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already
| an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws)
| but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way
| Austria has controlled rent prices (though californians might not
| like the fact that around 70% of housing in austria is limited or
| non profit).
|
| Also, this is a US-wide problem. California just has the best
| weather and open doors. But I doubt it's going to get better,
| wealth inequality does nothing but increase in the US. We'll see,
| but this looks to me more of a symptom than a sickness in itself.
| davidw wrote:
| High level, statistically speaking, there's a lot of evidence
| that homelessness correlates with housing prices. What's
| remarkable is how mad people get about the pretty self-
| explanatory notion that as a thing increases in costs, fewer
| people can afford it. They want to blame drugs or mental health
| or something. And while those do play a part for many people,
| the price of housing is what looms over it all:
|
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
|
| Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at
| the same time the housing market is like a big factory that
| produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say
| it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a
| losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of
| assistance that can be brought to bear.
| pydry wrote:
| >They want to blame drugs or mental health or something.
|
| Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to
| property prices and rents and thats the _last_ thing
| investors want.
|
| They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see
| people dying on the street than that, but theyre not
| comfortable admitting it.
|
| Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda _anything_
| except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing
| the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an
| exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing
| construction.
| davidw wrote:
| There are a lot of different ways of building 'enough'
| housing:
|
| https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-
| your-...
|
| Everyone has different preferences and ideas there, but the
| shortage is so, so damaging right now in so many ways.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's
| some points from a laypersons' point of view.
|
| Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not
| kept up with population growth. Population growth has been
| higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be
| surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on
| this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate
| change, war, economic whatnots, etc.
|
| The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after
| the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a
| long time. This caused both high end investors and relative
| laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some
| people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and
| rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge
| was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market,
| and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build
| up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is
| yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if
| you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up
| anything.
|
| Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and
| employers have been getting away with tightening the
| thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in
| mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage,
| their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed
| to.
|
| Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate
| change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate
| change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to
| overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass
| migrations; people can't live where there's no water.
|
| There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks
| and there's no quick fix.
| pookha wrote:
| Seems like just a simple supply issue. These complex zoning
| regulations have made it cost prohibitive for developers to
| make any margins unless they focus on high-end condo's or
| apartments. The zoning envelopes need to be re-worked so that
| builders aren't having to live on razor thin margins.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| Also, the "build more homes" makes a big assumption about
| _where_ the homes should be built.
|
| There are already small towns across the US where homes are
| ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in
| fact people are moving out.
|
| If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as
| those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a
| big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply.
|
| Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to
| get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up
| probably would.
| creshal wrote:
| Austria doesn't have a coordinated federal housing policy
| either, it's mostly just Vienna that aggressively builds city-
| or NPO-owned housing (and even there it's "only" about
| 40-45%1).
|
| And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that
| these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to
| _everyone_ at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have
| upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to
| long-term unemployed. I 'm not sure how well that'd go with
| American sensibilities.
|
| 1: https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-
| wohnungspo...
| crooked-v wrote:
| The most frustrating part of that is the absurd number of
| people who see the obvious problem of wildly expensive and
| tightly constrained housing supply, complain about it being
| impossible to buy a home, and then actively refuse to even
| allow for the possibility that cities may have been under-
| building for some time.
| nradov wrote:
| If those people bothered to actually _vote_ instead of just
| complaining online then the problem would be less severe.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| CA budget is around $250B annual.
| SMAAART wrote:
| And that boils down to how much $ per person per year?
| atdrummond wrote:
| That's because Cali's approach is insane.
|
| They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a
| month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your
| lifestyle.
|
| I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not
| locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for
| a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is
| absolutely insane how we've stopped treating homeless people as
| humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they
| can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash. There's no other
| conclusion to reach about how policy makers truly think about
| this class of people with the way the incentives of these
| "support" programs are structured.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| It's the "I'm gonna give you a social welfare check to fuck
| off" approach.
|
| Let's not pretend society really wants to hug these people or
| employers want to hire them.
| cashsterling wrote:
| Demographics of homeless populations is one of those things
| that is pretty hard to determine conclusively without some
| serious invasion of privacy and/or violation of rights.
|
| Take in consideration that homeless folks are under no
| obligation to tell the truth when surveyed or questioned and
| are generally aware that "migration of homeless into certain
| areas" is a hot-button issue (these folks are homeless, not
| stupid)... and we have a recipe for the demographics of
| homeless populations in these 'desirable' areas being
| misreported and the percent of out-of-region homeless being
| under-reported as a rule.
|
| Homeless folks definitely migrate to places that are more
| tolerant of homelessness and are all around "better" places to
| be homeless. SF, LA, Seattle, etc. are good places to be
| homeless. Boulder, CO is a good place to be homeless; they even
| put folks up in hotels in the winter for free when it is too
| cold outside.
|
| Some people moved to these regions before being homeless, but
| they moved here for easy access to drugs and the overall drug
| climate (often not arrested or prosecuted for possession of
| hard drugs and pot is legal). This is sort of 'pre-
| homelessness'... their drug addiction was practically
| guaranteeing they would become homeless eventually.
|
| BTW: Governments paying to bus their homeless people somewhere
| else so "it's not their problem" should be illegal unless
| tacitly agreement upon by the two regional/municipal
| governments. This practice is disgusting.
| skrebbel wrote:
| How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as
| "humans with potential and aspirations"?
|
| I'm not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that
| adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
|
| I don't have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most
| people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue
| for fewer rules, not more. So I'd like to understand your point
| better.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > How is giving people money unconditionally not treating
| them as "humans with potential and aspirations"?
|
| If access to money is not their actual impediment then you
| may be making their situation worse.
|
| > I'm not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying
| that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
|
| You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I
| should have done more?
|
| > argue for fewer rules
|
| Judging by living in the middle of this policy. The number of
| homeless has increased and the number of open air drug
| markets, prostitution, and suicides have increased with them.
| There is a concerted _lack_ of enforcement of rules. The
| homeless purchase RVs from scrap yards, move them onto the
| sides of streets, and live in them.
|
| Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored.
| Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this
| population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a
| massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this.
| And our response is just.. "here's $1000 and a legal carte
| blanche for anything short of murder."
|
| It's not working.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| "Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are
| ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to
| serve this population and get them out of the literal
| gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in
| the middle of this. "
|
| How do you pay to enforce all of this? Do jails have
| adequate space? Are there enough judges, courtrooms, and
| public defender's to handle this efficiently? Where should
| the children go?
|
| "It's not working"
|
| What are your suggestions for aiding people to be able to
| afford rent and sustaining themselves?
| dwallin wrote:
| I don't think this is a fair response. Throwing a
| conditional means-tested $1000 to a drowning man wouldn't
| save them either. You are grouping in different policies
| and treating them as if you have to accept a package deal
| or nothing. The binary choice is a false illusion.
|
| I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing.
| However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely
| point to a study validating the effectiveness of it,
| because the reality of means-testing is that it: a)
| Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost
| efficient b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people
| who need help behind c) Tends to create poverty traps and
| weird distorting incentives.
|
| I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services
| the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in
| terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the
| impact on society as a whole. This is a separate
| discussion.
|
| In reality though, I think most people on both sides think
| of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to
| actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally
| solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one
| of two solutions to these issues: 1) Making it difficult
| for those who are unhoused. 2) Trying to improve the
| situation of those who are unhoused.
|
| The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it
| just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it
| with cities and towns busing their homeless to other
| places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the
| criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach
| everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could
| make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the
| problem nationally become worse.
|
| On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve
| the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid
| on the core issue.
|
| The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and
| unfortunately this is an area which California has
| struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal
| to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat
| the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the
| same time.
| atdrummond wrote:
| This is a great response.
|
| One of the most under appreciated aspects of this is that
| the current policies actually hurt the homeless people who
| are stuck in a poverty trap and want to get out. They have
| to live daily with an ever increasing number of people who
| are allowed to engage in dangerous and uncivil behaviour.
| There are parents and children on the streets who want
| nothing more than to get off them - but until that happens,
| their quality of life has been made considerably worse by
| the policies presently in place.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I
| should have done more?
|
| What if we apply your logic to your own scenario?
|
| You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety
| only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you
| saying I should have done more?
| tivert wrote:
| >> You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying
| I should have done more?
|
| > You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to
| safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test.
| Are you saying I should have done more?
|
| I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you
| throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You
| don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution
| to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the
| water will spit them out if you pay it.
|
| And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make
| your problem _worse_. That $1000 might as well be
| considered a pile of drugs or booze.
|
| When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad
| actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very
| cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give
| out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they
| realized they were just getting pawned.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I'm with ya. My point is that his metaphor illustrates
| how even a helpful for the problem solution might not be
| helpful given the stipulations he's putting on the help.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You are drowning.
|
| I jump in and help you to shore.
|
| You immediately jump back in and start drowning again.
|
| Someone else helps you to shore
|
| You jump back in and start drowning again.
|
| Eventually everyone who would help you wants some kind of
| evidence that this time you won't just jump back in
| before they help you.
|
| You drown.
|
| Are you saying they should have done more?
| bombcar wrote:
| At some point you put up a fence, either around the
| drowning pond or around the jumper.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| In this metaphor the pond is drugs and the jumper is an
| addict.
|
| We've tried putting a "fence" around drugs, it doesn't
| work.
|
| And we've decided that putting a "fence" around addicts
| (aka prison) is wrong.
|
| So it seems like we really don't have options.
| matthew9219 wrote:
| People addicted to heroin don't achieve their potential or
| their aspirations. The compassionate thing to do for drug
| addicts is to help them stop being addicted to drugs, not
| give them an apartment where they can do drugs without
| bothering anybody. Parent commenter is saying the state is
| doing mostly the latter and little of the former.
| realjhol wrote:
| Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their
| needs is the peak of inhumanity.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The majority of homeless people are homeless for economic
| reasons, like loss of income, cost of living increases, or
| lack of affordable housing, or changes in co-living
| situations caused by break-ups/divorce/abuse/loss of
| partner's income/etc.
|
| Families are the fastest growing homeless demographic.
| [deleted]
| atdrummond wrote:
| And that group is hurt the most by having to share the
| streets with people whose uncivil and dangerous behaviour
| puts their life and well being in danger.
|
| Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is
| probably the original sin of modern American homeless
| policy.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's unfortunate. Most of the conversation here is about
| addicts and the mentally ill and how hard they are to
| help. Probably because they are the most visible.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| We should have separate programs for each, one with more
| resources. It is much easier to help someone without a
| substance abuse problem get back on their feet, so let's
| pick the lowest fruit first? It also provides some
| incentive to not get addicted to drugs, knowing that
| society is going to not try as hard to save you (this is
| already true, it just isn't codified anywhere).
|
| But ya, most people won't notice, since they didn't
| notice these people before.
| floren wrote:
| > Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is
| probably the original sin of modern American homeless
| policy
|
| It gives you some useful tricks, though. E.g. if somebody
| complains about the chronically homeless addicts
| assaulting people downtown? Why, you just point out that
| X% of "the homeless" are actually just regular non-
| addicted people temporarily down on their luck, who just
| need a free hotel room for a couple weeks.
| mikeryan wrote:
| _Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their
| needs is the peak of inhumanity._
|
| Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because
| usually at the top of the list is "drugs".
|
| There other services provided en-masse for homeless people
| with addiction problems but you can't force them to take
| advantage of them.
|
| The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the
| recipients addiction the hope is to address a symptom and
| prevent people with addiction problems from committing
| crimes to fuel their habits.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Drug-addicts is something you interpret. It is specified
| that they are homeless.
|
| Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you
| can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups
| of people.
|
| For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and
| his books. One of his important points about poverty is
| that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.
| goatlover wrote:
| And some people become poor because they are addicts or
| have mental health issues and refuse treatment.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| I can see that you're not in California, so I feel like I
| should reiterate that drugs are a massive problem among
| our homeless population here. It is something that needs
| consideration when trying to help them. The main problem
| with just giving people $1,000/mo is that it is nowhere
| near enough to get off the street, but more than enough
| to continue fueling a drug problem.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| That, and part of the problem seems to be that when
| people say "get them off the streets" the hidden
| statement is "but keep them in SF"
|
| SF is a ridiculously expensive city that people from
| across the US consider (who have homes even) consider
| themselves priced out of.
|
| It seems mind boggling that people think everyone
| deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to,
| say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where
| housing is cheaper!).
|
| Constructing that suburb would create jobs. The
| infrastructure needed to maintain it would create jobs.
| And even if it remains a net cash drain, it'll still
| likely be cheaper than 17B a year while giving people
| actual homes with opportunities to work their way up and
| out
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > It seems mind boggling that people think everyone
| deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to,
| say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where
| housing is cheaper!).
|
| The problem is that many homeless people would genuinely
| rather live on the streets or in shelters in the city
| proper where they have easy access to the things they
| want, versus having a house provided elsewhere.
|
| They want housing near their preferred begging spots and
| their dealers, basically.
| [deleted]
| atdrummond wrote:
| My problem when I was homeless wasn't that I was poor. My
| problem was that I would never be able to manage assets
| properly until I get my mental house in order and started
| prioritizing things properly.
|
| There are plenty of homeless people who are in a poverty
| trap, as you describe, but I think it oversimplifies the
| situation to argue the arrow of causality only goes one
| direction for all homeless people.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Bregman I am referring is Dutch, I am Danish. Two
| countries where you'd have to look really hard to find
| homeless people.
|
| I think over- _complication_ is the issue in the states,
| which in turn makes a lot of these grants go to heads
| thinking about the issues rather than the actual issues.
|
| I also think it is important to attribute issues where
| they are due: Mental issues is not a housing problem, it
| is a health care issue. Not being able to manage money is
| not a housing problem, it is a primary school problem.
| Etc.
|
| With all respect for your previous life, it does sound
| like you needed some quality health care more than a
| parental system that handed out food stamps (in fear that
| the money otherwise would have gone to drugs).
| atdrummond wrote:
| I agree completely with your third paragraph; I also
| agree regarding the Dutch (my partner lives in Amsterdam)
| and Danish programmes and their successes. Apologies if
| my reply misunderstood your initial post, as I feel we're
| actually in agreement here.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Maybe money isn't the right thing - it may reduce crime,
| but won't fix issues. But there's plenty of successful
| programs where they give drugs or substitutes to prevent
| withdrawal to addicts for free, no questions asked, no
| judgment. Or places to safely use, where privacy, health
| care and clean needles are available.
|
| But the subject isn't addicts, it's homeless people. Not
| all homeless people are addicts, and not all addicts are
| homeless.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I'm not at all against unconditional cash grants. I work for
| a non-profit that does just that.
|
| What I am against is a totally unstructured program where
| they hand cash out knowing that 90% of it goes into an open
| air drug market that they make no attempt to shut down or
| control.
|
| I'm not arguing for work requirements or time limits. People
| who are legitimately struggling will fall through the cracks.
| But I don't think it is insane or inhumane to require people
| to work with supportive assistance and be put on a pathway to
| supportive housing.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for clarifying. This makes a lot of sense
| to me.
| robotnikman wrote:
| If the money is just going back to the drug dealers I would
| think that would just exacerbate the problem and make it
| even worse, as it just encourages drug dealers and
| producers to make and sell more.
|
| There definitely needs to be case workers or someone
| involved to help provide these people a path to recovery.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > I'm not arguing for work requirements or time limits
|
| > I don't think it is insane or inhumane to require people
| to work
|
| Sorry if I'm missing something, but aren't these directly
| antithetical?
| nickff wrote:
| The parent seems to be saying that they are not sure
| whether work requirements are necessary for a support
| program to succeed, but that the requirements do not
| appear to be unreasonable or obviously counter-
| productive.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Why did you cut off the sentence? What I said had nothing
| to do with employment requirements but about the need for
| supportive services to enable unhoused persons to achieve
| the next steps in their path to stability.
| boucher wrote:
| I don't really understand the point you are making. "I'm
| not arguing for work requirements... But I don't think its
| insane to require people to work." So, you are in favor of
| work requirements then?
|
| This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's
| entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the
| $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the
| homelessness problem.
|
| Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that
| some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work
| requirements is not simple. And I think you need some
| evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed
| cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.
| floren wrote:
| He said "I don't think it is insane or inhumane to
| require people to work _with supportive assistance_ ",
| meaning to have the people engage with supportive
| assistance. Not "get a job before we help you" but "talk
| to the counselor while we're helping you"
| nathanyukai wrote:
| Because they are not going to spend it on things that's going
| to help them improve skills and finding jobs, they'll stuck
| as homeless forever.
|
| Like when world bank lend money to country that are
| bankrupted, they ask them to take the money for reform and
| try to improve their economy, same should happen here.
| christkv wrote:
| There are a lot of people making money in the current system.
| It's pretty obvious that just giving money to people trapped in
| a cycle of addiction is not going to break that cycle.
|
| They need treatment and in many cases it might need to be
| compelled to break the cycle. This then needs to be followed
| with integration programs (and jobs, schooling) that do not
| happen in the same area where they spent their time addicted.
| zhte415 wrote:
| > I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are
| not locals. Not even Californians!
|
| Source?
|
| Because this seems to be banded around in comments without
| anyone sourcing.
|
| I dropped this actual source [1] in another comment, that
| measures 13% of unsheltered homeless as coming from out of
| state for LA.
|
| [1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-
| my...
| nwienert wrote:
| On my street in the Mission there were mostly illegal
| immigrants living on the sidewalk in tents, they told me as
| much.
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah you can just go talk to them to find out where your
| local homeless are coming from.
| zumu wrote:
| That source quotes a study from LA county (not SF) in 2018,
| which discloses no methodology. So not a bullet-proof
| statistic by any means.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| If I recall correctly, this source was criticized because
| their measurement for being "out of state" was that you
| haven't been in CA for 2 years or so. So if someone had come
| in 2+ years ago for the CA homeless benefits then they would
| be considered not out of state.
|
| EDIT: I might be thinking of a different study, because going
| to that link shows that 65% were in LA county for 20 years
| supposedly:
| https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-
| ang...
|
| I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that
| information. If they used county records, it's a very
| different trust paradigm than if they just asked.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I didn't state any numbers. I don't know. All I have is
| anecdotes from myself and others who work in this space.
|
| That said, you don't think even 1 in 9 people being out of
| staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see
| how you can migrate and live far more easily than in
| Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won't
| increase? That there isn't a negative psychic impact to
| homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the
| system having to live around many others who are content to
| collect their scrip?
|
| I'm skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I
| don't think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it
| reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who
| both originate from within, and outside, California.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Homeless people will always gravitate towards where
| sleeping rough is easier - no one wants to risk freezing to
| death.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| > I don't think it is the non-issue you think it is.
|
| Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the
| user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you
| are arguing with that imaginary person.
| crooked-v wrote:
| On the other hand, $1K a month in SF won't even get you a bed
| in a shared room. I mean that literally - I just checked
| apartments.com and there's exactly one listing out of 5,400
| right now that's under $1000 and open to non-students.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You can absolutely find a bedroom for 1000/m, but you're
| going to have to interact with people.
|
| Check how long those apartments have been listed for, some of
| them have been listed for a year. If it's an actual
| competitive price it will get rented immediately.
|
| There are shared housing groups on facebook that will reflect
| the situation more accurately.
| fragmede wrote:
| Who uses apartments.com? Craigslist is still the place to go.
| atdrummond wrote:
| They don't need a bed or a room. You can camp quite
| comfortably throughout the city all year long thanks to the
| mild weather.
|
| It's a very different situation than being homeless in cities
| with more typical seasonal weather patterns; I nearly lost a
| number of toes due to frostbite when I was homeless in Saint
| Louis during a major blizzard. San Francisco's climate and
| permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing
| related issues that are involved with being homeless.
| cumshitpiss wrote:
| [dead]
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Where do you get the idea apartments.com is a source that can
| inform you about the market price of shared housing?
|
| As a long-time participant in the bay area rental housing
| market, $1000 is enough to rent a bedroom in many homes, but
| how would such a listing get onto apartments.com?
|
| If you're paying more than $1000 to share a bedroom, you're
| getting ripped off.
| o1y32 wrote:
| Your comment does not provide any concrete example. Even if
| what you say is true, access is a real issue. You think
| homeless people would know how to find those $1000 options
| if a random person cannot find them via a simple search?
| guardiangod wrote:
| >It is absolutely insane how we've stopped treating homeless
| people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that
| all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash.
|
| Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada.
|
| When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the
| activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-
| humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and
| that we should give them (the users and the NGOs) money and
| safe-supply drug and leave them alone on the street.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Both of these approaches would work for some people, but
| neither works for everyone -- it's a very complicated and
| dynamic problem that has many causes, and many symptoms that
| are often mistaken for causes.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > force detox
|
| Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right
| to body autonomy. In general people tend to react very badly
| when their body autonomy is violated: the results are trauma,
| CPTSD, suicide. I suggest we try other solutions first,
| starting from a place of compassion, empathy and
| scientifically tested medical advice.
| nomel wrote:
| > and scientifically tested medical advice.
|
| Like detox centers, which exist to minimize trauma,
| suicide, and CPTSD.
|
| > Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their
| right to body autonomy.
|
| Giving an addict a steady supply of money often just kills
| them (like my sister). I consider that some sort of
| violation. As is, letting addicts do drugs might sort
| itself out [1]. I imagine 2022-2023 numbers will be very
| very depressing.
|
| [1] https://www.nist.gov/image/drug-overdose-deaths-chart-0
| wil421 wrote:
| There's people on this forum who are homeless and quite
| popular. This person got quite angry when I asked about force
| detox. They said they didn't want to have stipulations put on
| sober housing and would rather be homeless. My comment was
| greeted with hostility from many people.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Active interventions is one thing, forced detox is another.
| This involves restricting someone's freedom of movement,
| subjecting them to a very unpleasant experience, and then
| dropping them back off in the same community with a massive
| drug craving and a lower tolerance.
|
| You'd want to see evidence of incredible effectiveness to be
| willing to engage in something like that, but the evidence
| just isn't there: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic
| le/pii/S095539591...
|
| > Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes
| related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies
| suggesting potential harms. Given the potential for human
| rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-
| compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by
| policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.
|
| Note that this systematic review looked at compulsory
| treatment methods besides just detox, but none of the results
| were that impressive.
| tptacek wrote:
| There's a pervasive belief that homeless people in various
| comfortable climes are migrants from harsher locales, but
| when you do the research you apparently tend to find that
| they're overwhelmingly people who had stable living
| situations in those comfortable locations, and became
| homeless there: they aren't "imported". So the "warmest place
| in Canada" thing is unlikely to be meaningful, unless there's
| some reason a comfortable climate makes housing less stable.
| guardiangod wrote:
| https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-homeless-
| national-...
|
| >In the City of Vancouver's 2019 homeless count, based on
| those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless
| reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro
| Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of
| BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.
|
| Where is the data backing up your claim?
| magicalist wrote:
| If you go to the actual report[1] instead of whatever
| this site is, you'll see that question (3.9) was asking
| where they lived _before they moved to Vancouver_ , not
| before they became homeless or whatever that site is
| attempting to imply.
|
| If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of
| respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became
| homeless, which is the data to match the claim
| ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations
| in those comfortable locations, and became homeless
| there").
|
| [1] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-
| count-2019...
| guardiangod wrote:
| So they moved to Vancouver, had a home for a year, then
| become homeless. The news article did not claim that the
| homeless respondents were homeless before they moved;
| simply that they are not local to Vancouver.
|
| If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you
| weren't financially stable to begin with.
|
| EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in
| Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them
| regardless of where they came from.
| soperj wrote:
| Vancouver isn't just the warmest place, it's also the most
| expensive. There definitely have been cases of other parts
| of the country paying for a bus ticket out to the coast,
| just like they did to homeless people in Vancouver, sending
| them to Victoria during the Winter Olympics.
| guardiangod wrote:
| Victoria, Nanaimo etc. also have significant homeless
| issues, and I fully support out of province homeless
| people moving to Vancouver for whatever reason they might
| have. Freedom of movement is important to democracy.
|
| But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the
| bucks, the federal and provincial government are
| pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC
| municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This
| is simply not possible.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I used to live in Nanaimo as a kid (Go McGirr!). The
| city's economy was royally fucked in the 2000s. There
| were no jobs other than Provincial services like VIHA or
| the one paper mill that I think ended up shutting down.
| Hells Angels were also always a thing back there, and
| there was a reservation nearby which had some persistent
| social issues. I still have family there who ended up
| making a killing in construction thanks to Chinese money
| and idk if Nanimo will ever get better.
| soperj wrote:
| Harmac ended up being bought by the people who actually
| operated the mill from an American company that went
| bankrupt, and has been running well since 2008.
| derefr wrote:
| The majority of small towns in northern BC have been
| gradually depopulating for decades, due to economic
| pressures similar to those in the Rust Belt of the US. (And
| plus, it's just damn cold up there, so it's hard to be
| homeless if you do end up homeless.) Their populations have
| to be going _somewhere_.
|
| Yes, homeless people _don 't_ actually sit on the streets
| of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to
| Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here
| instead.
|
| But people _are_ often in some kind of unstable living
| situation wherever they are, and find out about some job
| offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to
| come here for a chance at a _more_ stable living situation.
| But after coming here (and spending what little capital
| they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it
| was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous
| stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found
| was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the
| building owner then figured out how to work around this by
| "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the
| rents; etc.
|
| I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people
| wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression
| that many of these folks _had_ a "stable living situation"
| for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this
| stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning
| power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-
| cost-of-living environment.
|
| These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns,
| and just want to escape a failing small town with no
| economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job
| skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g.
| doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people _can_ still
| move -- but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the
| highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't
| afford to _live_ in Vancouver; they have to commute in from
| quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better
| off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but
| _non-failing_ town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission,
| etc.
| guardiangod wrote:
| >these folks would be much better off moving to another
| small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in
| BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
|
| That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also
| have their own homeless issues. I don't think their
| municipal gov would be open to the province providing
| relocation resources to these people.
|
| Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron
| clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move
| due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.
|
| Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they
| move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them
| exit first.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The small towns in BC don't have their homeless issues,
| because without services, you either die or are in a bus
| to Vancouver. A common route for homeless people in
| Montana is to wind up in Spokane first and then Seattle
| later, since you can't really survive in MT at all
| without a job, and while Spokane used to provide a bunch
| of flop houses (my grandfather owned one), those are gone
| now and it is too cold to live unsheltered there in the
| winter. Cities do pick up much of a national problem
| because of the social resources they can provide, and
| accordingly only national solutions have a chance of
| working.
| George83728 wrote:
| Prince George as non-failing? Have you been there? I've
| never seen so many zombified homeless junkies wandering
| aimlessly than I have in Prince George. Not in Vancouver,
| San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. Not in any other
| city. Prince George is horrific. Honestly the worst town
| or city I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. All of
| the 'normal' people inside businesses had thousand yard
| stares, shell shocked, and asked why I would even visit
| their town.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| but when you do the research
|
| Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd
| like to update my belief.
|
| Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:
|
| - San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other
| places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related
| to camping, drugs and petty crime
|
| - Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed,
| and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order
| to qualify for benefits
|
| - Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like
| they're from around here
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| "Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in
| San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4%
| outside California.
|
| Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said
| they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year,
| while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more
| years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they
| lived in the city between one and 10 years before
| becoming homeless."
|
| At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived
| in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/public-health/san-francisco-
| homeless-...
| labcomputer wrote:
| > At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived
| in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
|
| This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I
| would encourage you to download and read the original
| homeless census report.
|
| A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived
| unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long
| term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not
| really from SF, even if they _technically_ become
| homeless while living in SF.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Thank you for the link.
|
| But I'm skeptical of those data, because:
|
| 1. The data are from folks with an agenda:
|
| - The folks at the Department of Homelessness and
| Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend
| on those numbers being high in order to justify their
| budgets and salaries.
|
| - The people actually collecting the information mostly
| work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on
| those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56
| of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and
| Training".)
|
| 2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $
| incentives to never admit you're not from here.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| > - The folks at the Department of Homelessness and
| Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend
| on those numbers being high in order to justify their
| budgets and salaries.
|
| I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came
| out that 100% of the local homeless population became
| homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how
| would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with
| addressing the problem of homelessness?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless
| population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to
| California
|
| If this were the case, I suspect proposed solutions would
| shift away from building and maintaining shelters and
| Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and more toward
| helping people return home. The latter would require much
| less than the $600MM+ the DPHSH spends each year.
| magicalist wrote:
| Maybe start with stating _what_ data it would take to
| outweigh the accents you may have overheard one time?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Do you have any data that is based on some combination of
| things that are good indications of someone making San
| Francisco their permanent home, e.g.
|
| - tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)
|
| - utility bill payments
|
| - high school graduation (or even enrollment) records
|
| - rent receipts or rental contracts
|
| I'm not saying _all_ of those are required. But if the
| data come from a biased source (like one whose existence
| or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are
| all from out of town), then it 's hard to accept it when
| absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Can you point me to any of that research? If I 'm
| wrong I'd like to update my belief_
|
| I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs
| if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence.
| Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?
| matthew9219 wrote:
| It's a bit more complex than that. At the surface, it's
| true - only 15% of homeless people in Seattle lived out of
| county before becoming homeless. But a deeper look shows as
| many as 30% more never really could afford housing - they
| had marginal housing situations, living with a friend,
| relative, or romantic partner without paying a
| proportionate share for their prior living situation.
|
| This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15%
| number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45%
| number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're
| measuring.
|
| See e.g. http://allhomekc.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/07/Updated-7.11...
|
| Edit: not to mention that these studies are all surveys and
| this political issue is pretty well known, so there is a
| strong incentive to lie.
| bawolff wrote:
| I definitely see less homeless people in places that go to
| -40 in the winter. Now I don't know why, maybe they still
| exist but are less visible. Perhaps the threat of
| homelessness is a lot scarier when it is cold outside.
| Maybe homeless people in those climates move. I don't know,
| but anecdotally it does seem like there are much fewer
| homeless people in cold places.
| bombcar wrote:
| They certainly exist. https://www.hmismn.org/point-in-
| time-count-information
|
| But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40,
| which means that nature itself forces _something_ (or you
| just die).
|
| (Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute
| embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major
| should be done like just re-activating them and providing
| housing).
| soperj wrote:
| Detox doesn't really work if they don't want it. The active
| intervention w/r to homelessness would be to actually house
| these people. Lots of these people are using drugs to cope
| with other problems, without dealing with the other issues
| what are the chances of detox actually being worthwhile?
| guardiangod wrote:
| If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are
| just going to trash the place. Vancouver has been building
| and rebuilding support housing because the units get
| trashed and literally ripped apart after a week.
|
| Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than
| SF/LA and it is still not working.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they
| are just going to trash the place.
|
| This is underreported to a criminal degree.
|
| Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one
| live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even
| the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the
| first place.
|
| We couldn't _keep_ a roof over the head of a
| schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or
| stipends available to renovate your own home to the
| security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike
| problematic foster children, there is no state agency
| that pretends to have your back in this endeavor.
| Meanwhile you 're cohabitating with someone regularly
| insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and
| occasionally molesting your family members, which does
| wonders for _their_ mental health. Normally your entire
| family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share
| this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the
| Rules of Society about as well as the criminal
| population. So in _failing_ to solve one problem, you
| create five more.
|
| Even more fun in California, since they become _tenants_
| of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the
| savvy ones will shake you down when you try to
| [unlawfully] evict them.
|
| This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard
| not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior
| is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The
| only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which
| is the same argument that has been made to excuse
| criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle
| either group.
| George83728 wrote:
| The local political / NGO class are corrupt and in bed
| with the local construction companies. They all live in
| the same nice gated neighborhoods, go to the same clubs
| and schools, intermarry each other, etc. And so they all
| profit from this cycle of developing land on the
| taxpayers dime then letting it get trashed by the
| homeless. All the while the homeless continue to
| terrorize the general public, providing the impetus to
| keep this grift going.
|
| The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and
| vote for any politician that offers a solution. The
| politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves
| and their NGO/developer friends _(more money for more
| housing!)_ , while not actually addressing the problem of
| homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless
| just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians
| who seek to keep them locked into their destructive
| lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are
| given de facto permission to continue harassing regular
| people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from
| shops, wander through working class neighborhoods
| screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are
| permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure
| on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians
| who profit from it.
|
| The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public
| into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will
| move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking
| around and trying to reform local politics.
| goatlover wrote:
| Then incarceration in mental institutions and long term
| drug rehab facilities seems like the only answer.
| bombcar wrote:
| Maybe we need to do Australia again, but instead of for
| debtors it's for drug rehab. Just make sure the entire
| island we pick is drug-free. (Yes, there are obvious
| issues with this and it's likely incompatible with our
| current view of what a "free society" is).
| bluGill wrote:
| That has been tried before. We stopped doing it because
| of how horrible it was. The homeless are better off than
| in the institutions of old.
|
| I don't know if modern institutions could be better.
| However we know they failed in the past. If you want to
| propose them again, you need to provide some proof that
| they new ones will be better than the old.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > The homeless are better off than in the institutions of
| old.
|
| Well, I'm glad someone is because everyone else seems to
| be worse off as a result
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| > Well, I'm glad someone is because everyone else seems
| to be worse off as a result
|
| Fortunately mass incarceration and just doing nothing
| aren't the only two options.
| youreincorrect wrote:
| > I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are
| not locals. Not even Californians!
|
| My least favorite part of this was the local media pretended
| this wasn't true. They pretended it _vociferously_ despite this
| being such an obvious lie.
| acchow wrote:
| The statistic thrown around is something like "About 70
| percent of people who are homeless became homeless while
| living in the Bay Area." I'm not sure how to interpret this.
| I cant find the question they actually asked or how they
| collected people to survey.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this? It is done
| in NYC, and it was a major bone of contention that the high
| level of service was effectively magnetizing the city for
| homeless in other parts of the country to come here, or for
| cities even to bus them here. The law is a little vague on
| the matter, but the prevailing belief by the NYC
| administration is that anyone who can make it to the agency's
| doorstop and claim homelessness is entitled to emergency
| shelter up to 6 months, with no residency check (let alone
| U.S. citizenship), and there is no clear regulation
| preventing renewal. Even before the current foreign migrant
| crisis, about 10-15% of the shelter population came from
| outside NYC as their most recent stated prior address.
| labcomputer wrote:
| They do, and if you dig into them, the numbers show that
| most people are not from SF.
|
| https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-
| Co...
|
| By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless
| population "became homeless while living in SF."
|
| Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while
| living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10
| years _at the time of the census_ (the agency only has
| buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect
| the amount of time the person lived in SF _before_ becoming
| homeless).
|
| So, although they may have _technically_ "become homeless
| while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any
| meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years
| since they first got here, including time while homeless).
| Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under
| 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25
| when they first became homeless.
|
| When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an
| upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is
| really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and
| have been here >10 years).
|
| It's probably even lower when you consider that the current
| episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so
| while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many
| have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only
| marginally housed when arriving).
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn 't track this?_
|
| Previous discussions on HN suggest that the official stats
| are misleading and, for example, will count one as "local"
| if their last official street address was time in a local
| prison.
| [deleted]
| laurels-marts wrote:
| This is not surprising at all. Currently it's all about
| affirmation and validation and being your true authentic self.
| Suggesting alterations to lifestyles implies that some
| lifestyles might be inferior to others. Would this implication
| end at drug use or could it be extended to other areas of life
| as well? When you extrapolate this a bit further you could
| quickly get yourself labeled closed-minded and a bigot.
| Therefore just throwing cash non-judgmentally at these problems
| and hoping the issues go away is the only path forward for
| many.. alternatives would be too uncomfortable to stomach.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| There's also simply no good solution for people with mental
| health issues. People who need help aren't scooped up & put
| somewhere for treatment. They're left on the street.
| Convolutional wrote:
| > I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are
| not locals. Not even Californians!
|
| I visited the Bay Area a number of times and only met one
| person who was born locally. "Not even Americans!" in many
| cases.
| callmeal wrote:
| It's a big merry-go-round and someone is clearly making bank.
|
| NY -> Hawaii
|
| https://nypost.com/2019/10/26/nyc-homeless-initiative-sends-...
|
| WY -> UT
|
| https://www.deseret.com/utah/2022/11/4/23440578/jackson-wyom...
|
| NV -> CA
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-...
|
| SF -> ??
|
| https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-expanding-program-that-ha...
|
| And more recently:
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/15/greg-abbott-texas-ka...
| eks391 wrote:
| Obviously there's going to be some abuse of this system (by the
| homeless), but overall I think this is really cool, and I fail
| to see how this makes bank for any of the orchestraters
| involved.
|
| Cities that deal with high levels of homelessness are usually
| places that are deemed unaffordable anyways by the common
| American. Also if the place is warm, has easy access to drugs,
| and generous help with minimal requirements of the beneficiary
| to receive that aid. I awknowledge there will always be
| individuals who would rather have awful living standards than
| assume any responsibilities, but for those people who actually
| want to forge a better life for themselves, who fell through
| the cracks and are homeless perhaps to poor decisions but
| otherwise want to stand back up, this is awesome.
|
| The article you labelled "SF -> ??" Specifically said it was
| tranporting them to family or friends who know that person, ie.
| someone who would have individual concern for them to get them
| back on their feet.
|
| > "We consider a person being removed from the street and
| reunited with a stable, loving family as the best possible
| outcome," Hussey said. "This is not shifting the homeless
| problem to other cities. This is a person being removed from
| the street and being helped by the people who love them the
| most -- their families."
|
| "NV -> CA" ironically goes against your statement, because the
| article is saying that Nevada _stopped_ sending people to SF.
| Also they were trying to replicate what SF was doing, sending
| them to families, but in the worst possible way that was
| guaranteed to fail, because they sent them to a location
| without contacting any family or even seeing if any lived where
| they were putting them.
|
| > Homeless patients are no longer bused to other areas and
| state officials want to move forward
|
| "NY -> Hawaii" is similar to the "SF -> ??" one because despite
| the title, they were sending them nationwide, not just Hawaii.
| Their approach was the most easily abused, because they paid
| for a year's worth of livelihood. However, for people who have
| real intentions to improve their lives, this provides great
| hope in that dream because they get a fresh start, and in a
| place that is not impossibly expensive to live in and
| guaranteeing future impoverishment.
|
| Regarding "WY -> UT", SLC, where they are being taken to in UT,
| is one of the few places where they focus on rehab rather than
| perpetual homelessness, and basically all homelessness programs
| are focused on addiction recovery, and acquisition of a job. It
| is illegal to beg there, or to give money to homeless, because
| the only possible way to be homeless there is by refusing
| rehabilitation. I have no proof of these comments of SLC, as
| this perspective is based on what I've heard from others, so it
| could be wrong, but I've heard nothing to the contrary. So I am
| again optimistic for this approach from Wyoming, although I
| think it'd be better if they just adopted the same system
| instead of overloading another states rehabs.
|
| The last article you posted has no relevancy to the topic, as
| it discusses migrants and the border issue, not homelessness,
| so I will skip it.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Having lived/spent time in a few places with varying homeless
| problems and approaches to homelessness, I find it fucking
| depressing every time I read about how badly - and inefficiently
| - the US handles it.
|
| Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country.
|
| Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you
| are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable
| impact, where the fuck is the money going?
|
| Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems
| glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We
| also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being
| billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind
| housing.
|
| Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the
| state almost anywhere, they just aren't fucked doing so (we have
| this issue in Ireland).
|
| There's no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best
| putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is
| large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some
| affordable, some private. And that's a whole clusterfuck that
| seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the
| exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| > The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed
| use housing - some social, some affordable, some private.
|
| It's a LOT more than making affordable housing available. Most
| homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug
| addictions, or both. Some are also homeless in large part
| because of criminal records. Many many difficult social
| problems to fix before it's just a matter of affordability.
| jganetsk wrote:
| This is a common misconception. Actually the primary fix is
| indeed to make affordable housing available.
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-
| know-...
| TexanFeller wrote:
| My best friend from high school is homeless right now
| despite my efforts to help him. My best friend from grade
| school was homeless in my town for a few years(I wasn't
| aware at first to help). My wife was a social worker. I've
| had many interactions, albeit brief, with homeless in my
| city. I'm not exactly ignorant and I'm not sure the fellow
| from your article isn't an activist with an agenda. I'm
| also skeptical of the data gathered on the problem. It's
| probably not very good because in most cities they can't
| even get an accurate census/count of homeless.
| p_j_w wrote:
| It seems awfully convenient that you get to dismiss all
| of the evidence that goes against what you'd like to
| believe with a simple wave of your hand.
| jganetsk wrote:
| Noah Smith is no activist. He was a professor of finance
| and a journalist for the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and
| other reputable outlets. He now writes a very successful
| Substack.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| The linked article says it is "A guest post by Aaron
| Carr."
| emodendroket wrote:
| That's just not borne out by any evidence. It's likely you
| don't interact (or don't knowingly interact) with a large
| portion of homeless people who aren't drawing attention to
| themselves.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Yeah the low drama homeless people that would be easiest to
| help don't make the headlines. They're quietly struggling,
| working some minimum wage job while living in a camper
| somewhere.
|
| And yet the high drama people that make the headlines are
| used as an argument to not build affordable homes at all.
|
| The hard to house with an array of overlapping severe
| challenges will always be hard to house, but we can't let
| that small minority be any sort of barrier to helping the
| broader amount of people that are easier to help that are
| nonetheless struggling to find anywhere they can afford to
| live.
| nancyhn wrote:
| It's going to the administrators of the homeless industrial
| complex. It's the same problem we're seeing with colleges where
| the number of administrators has dramatically grown year over
| year.
|
| Managerial bloat. The more money we give, the more they grow.
| poorbutdebtfree wrote:
| The Greater Boston Food Bank CEO cleared a $500K salary this
| year, for a job that's largely remote because the area is too
| dangerous for the non-profit white collar workers. Do you think
| she wants "food insecurity" to be solved?
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/427...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this seems fine to me, managing the greater boston food bank
| sounds like it needs a good manager to better spend the other
| 99.8%
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > There's no easy fix for homelessness
|
| True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add
| housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by
| a lack of homes.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| yep.
|
| Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug
| problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the
| numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of
| the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few
| decades even as population grew.
|
| If we had actually _gained_ affordable housing stock as
| population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a
| different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a
| small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but
| we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we
| are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we
| have now.
| spydr wrote:
| In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of
| drug use
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of
| homeless you don't notice because they aren't raving like a
| lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems,
| but they are sadly often conflated.
| chagen wrote:
| "Definitely the result"? I think you might be confusing
| correlation with causation.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That really isn't true either. Homelessness doesn't cause
| drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the
| housed, it isn't weird that some of them eventually lose
| their support network. There are definitely economic
| homeless in Seattle, they just aren't as visible as the
| fent addicts.
| robomartin wrote:
| > Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.
|
| That is absolutely not true. Not even close.
|
| Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors.
| Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76%
| having substance abuse and severe mental illness.
|
| One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse
| and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower
| numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government
| entities who publish them will typically change the
| definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers
| and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix
| homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a
| building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the
| real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking
| about.
|
| Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could
| actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick
| and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn
| even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention
| to get them back to functional status.
|
| In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up
| sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as
| necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just
| don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and
| there's very little society can really do to help them.
|
| Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently)
| hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| "Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people
| could actually pay for a place to stay."
|
| Or we could just... choose to house people, regardless of
| their ability to pay?
| worik wrote:
| > Or we could just... choose to house people, regardless
| of their ability to pay?
|
| Yes
|
| Priorities?
| apstls wrote:
| How many homes could $17B make?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| We don't even need to have the government build the homes,
| just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge
| positive change.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Where are you gonna build? It's illegal to build pretty
| much anything in CA cities with high homelessness
| jupp0r wrote:
| ~17000 in CA
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| apartments would be cheaper than 400K per.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and
| it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for
| the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| You could build a lot of them for $3.7B/year though..
| split among 150,000 homeless, that's $24,000 per year
| each
|
| 'course, it's not hard to imagine those homes ending up
| like the free zone in The Wire or the housing projects in
| Judge Dredd...
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to
| existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in
| the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if
| there were political will.
|
| We all can _say_ homelessness is a problem, but if you ask
| these people hoarding vacant homes if they 'd be willing to
| house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a
| politician whether they are willing to nationalize those
| properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be
| "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not _that_ big a
| problem. " The rubber is not hitting the road.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| The vast majority of those "vacant" homes are either very
| temporarily up for sale or rent, dilapidated, or in need of
| a lot of repairs. There are not 16 million habitable units
| sitting empty year after year.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The vast majority of those homes are either being actively
| fixed/waiting for a tenant to move in or are in bumfuck
| where no one wants to live. If you can convince the
| homeless on the west coast to move to the vacant places in
| kansas congratulations, you just won California's governor
| election. The reality is that there are not nearly enough
| homes where people want to be. Until you can force the
| homeless to go to less desirable areas the homes there
| arent helpful.
| worik wrote:
| > but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if
| they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their
| property,
|
| I fail to see that "ask" is the correct approach
|
| If you own a vacant property where there is homelessness,
| where does "ask" come in?
|
| The appropriate verbs are "tell" or "compell"
|
| Private property is not an absolute right
| hnuser847 wrote:
| Nah, it's caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short
| of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there's
| actually nothing we can do to get these people off the
| street.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your
| hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation
| between housing costs and homelessness rates.
|
| Update, here's a reference:
| https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-
| lin...
| khazhoux wrote:
| Where's the "victim-blaming"?
|
| From the reporting I've seen, the vast majority of folks
| on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And
| they refuse shelters because then they couldn't use.
|
| How does more housing help them?
| slg wrote:
| From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years
| back[1]:
|
| 15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse
| problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.
|
| 25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people
| are in shelters.
|
| Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.
|
| So you are partially right that drug use and mental
| health issues can make sheltering some people more
| difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either
| of these issues make up a majority of all homeless
| people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that
| people with these issues are the most visibly homeless.
| The people who are living in their car or a shelter and
| simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as
| homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can
| also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of
| LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically
| homeless.
|
| Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the
| problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when
| in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3423-2019-greater-los-
| ang...
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.
|
| You fix the housing issue first, make their lives less
| fucking miserable, then it's easier to get someone to
| accept help for their drug addiction.
|
| You can't "cure" an addict who isn't ready to be
| "helped".
| paisawalla wrote:
| > _Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the
| problem._
|
| As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to
| put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry
| shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely
| incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at
| societal scale.
|
| As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in
| my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to
| increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material
| deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying
| deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I
| honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >this is a naive, academic view
|
| Academic maybe, but that's a hell of a lot better than
| one person who thinks their personal anecdote is more
| powerful than scientific evidence.
| paisawalla wrote:
| If your understanding of the scientific evidence is that
| it supports "dry shelters are harmful and their existence
| exacerbates heroin addiction," then I think that's a good
| argument in favor of the inclusion of anecdotes on this
| topic.
| p_j_w wrote:
| If your understanding of the scientific method and
| critical inquiry amounts to "if you have some belief I
| don't like then anecdotes are useful" then you need to
| level up your understanding of the scientific method and
| critical inquiry.
| specialist wrote:
| What percentage of the unhoused are on Skid Row?
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| 1. Homeless are drug addicts.
|
| 2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug
| addiction.
|
| Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental
| illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.
|
| No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness
| among the homeless. California has neither the highest
| rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates
| of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of
| homelessness.
|
| There is no correlation between rates of mental illness
| and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation
| between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a
| strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.
|
| Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't
| automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for
| a room is $400/month.
| nfw2 wrote:
| "Rates of mental illness among people who are homeless in
| the United States are twice the rate found for the
| general population"
|
| https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/homeles
| sne...
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| You've completely missed the point. These people aren't
| homeless in cheaper housing markets.
| nfw2 wrote:
| I agree blaming the homeless is oversimplifying a
| complicated issue, but I don't think it's evident that
| shortage of housing is the primary cause.
|
| There are plausible explanations for non-causal
| correlations between housing costs and homelessness. For
| example:
|
| - homeless tend towards warm climates, which have higher
| housing costs because most people prefer warm climates
|
| - homeless tend towards cities, where they can more
| easily find support. Cities also have higher costs of
| living because they are densely populated
|
| Looking at the list of cities with the most homelessness
| per capita, the vast majority of them are temperate year-
| round. http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-
| homelessness.ht...
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| >Cities also have higher costs of living because they are
| densely populated
|
| Isn't population density supposed to introduce
| efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think,
| that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.
| philwelch wrote:
| You're both sort of right.
|
| The visible homeless--the vagrants you see in tent cities
| under the freeway or harassing pedestrians--are more likely
| to have drug addictions or other mental illnesses. And the
| more mentally ill they are, the more visible they become
| since they end up committing crimes and making a nuisance
| of themselves. If you're mainly concerned about the
| externalities of homelessness--e.g. needles and human feces
| on the street, crime, harassment, etc--then you'd be well
| served addressing this problem in particular.
|
| If you define "homeless" by people not having consistent
| housing, there is a much larger population of those people.
| Maybe they're sleeping on a buddy's couch, or they find a
| kind stranger to take them in, or they get by via stealth
| camping. On the margin, expanding public housing or making
| housing more affordable would help these people. But it
| wouldn't do much about the more visible and troublesome
| ones.
| mastazi wrote:
| I don't know, the article mentions people who work two jobs
| having to live in an RV because they can't afford rent. As
| an external observer, it seems to me that in some parts of
| the US, inequality is so bad that homelessness is eating
| the working class. In Europe or Australia[1], the lady
| working two jobs or the war veteran taking $1200/month in
| social security would definitely not be homeless. Would
| they live in government housing, in a sketchy part of town?
| Sure. But how can you even compare that to being
| homeless...
|
| [1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a
| rental crisis and becoming much worse.
| [deleted]
| specialist wrote:
| Which happens first? Do the unhoused become addicts? The
| addicts become homeless? A mix?
| mafribe wrote:
| Hard drug addicts prefer using their limited income for
| drugs rather than rent. (Note that as of Jun 2023, hard
| drug addiction has no known cure.)
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental
| illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families
| and forcing them to be responsible for their children,
| teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do
| to get these people off the street.
|
| You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and
| turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a
| couple of months ago I watched a very tropey discussion
| take place on the lack of a robust US rail system. In
| another discussion, the lack of a robust US healthcare
| system.
|
| All the armchair pundits come out to point to other
| countries as leaders in these areas, but when it comes to
| homelessness, I see a lot less of it pointing to places
| like Japan, Singapore and the APAC region, where
| homelessness is a cultural stigma placed not just on the
| individual but on the family. Family name and culture mean
| something. Generational safety nets are present because the
| family cares for the individual simply because they share a
| common genealogy. Families will go very far to avoid
| allowing a member of their heritage to become a vagabond.
|
| Weird to me how this part is left out of the conversation.
| Perhaps this is a consequence of our indulgence in
| unrestricted libertarian individualism.
| specialist wrote:
| Your thesis is that the USA isn't sufficiently punitive
| towards the poor and working class?
|
| What are some (policy) ideas for making them more
| desperate, more miserable?
| hnuser847 wrote:
| I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can
| actually force people with mental health or addiction
| issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being
| mentally ill or addicts _is_ a viable to solution to
| homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this
| will never happen in the West. For better or worse,
| individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition,
| and it will never be politically palatable to force
| people into shelters.
| jlawson wrote:
| Forcing people into treatment was our standard approach
| to this problem for decades and it worked very well. We
| need to bring it back.
|
| There should be zero people doing meth on the street; if
| you see one it should be a single phone call to have the
| cops pick that person up and send them to the secured
| treatment facility on the edge of town.
|
| This really is not complex or cruel or novel.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| That's a probable consequence, but not my point.
|
| My point is that our drunkenness on individualism has led
| to a low view of the family. If you have a low view of
| family then you're primed to inevitably become ambivalent
| at best, cynical at worst, to your own kin.
|
| Again, all in the name of individualism.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The vast majority of people who are homeless don't suffer
| from mental illness or drug addiction. The most visible do,
| but not most of them. And of those, a bunch didn't suffer
| from drug addiction when they become homeless.
| umvi wrote:
| > If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions
| into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is
| the money going?
|
| A lot of these programs are hard to stop paying into once you
| start. Say you are a political leader and you try to solve
| homelessness by pouring $X per year into some new program. 5
| years later it's clear the program is not effective. However,
| if you axe the program, good luck getting re-elected since
| you've now made it very easy for your opponent to lambaste you
| ("Hundreds of society's most vulnerable brace themselves as
| Governor X seeks to axe homeless program").
| sroussey wrote:
| And places like SF with a budget of about $100k/yr/person for
| homeless, make it effectively illegal to get an accounting of
| where the money goes.
| losteric wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I don't follow how the amount of money
| spent "makes it effectively illegal" to audit.
| sroussey wrote:
| The amount doesn't, it's the culture of the city
| government and protection of the service providers that
| actually receive the money.
| cute_boi wrote:
| This is the fundamental reason why democracies often face
| challenges. For instance, let's consider a country like
| India, where a significant portion of the population isn't
| financially well-off. As a result, there is an expectation
| for government assistance and benefits during each election
| cycle. Consequently, politicians who promise freebies or
| welfare programs tend to have a higher likelihood of being
| elected. This pattern is not unique to India; it can be
| observed in various other places as well. Even in the United
| States, which prides itself on its democratic system, the
| influence of this phenomenon is evident
| Pulcinella wrote:
| The government should help people and make their lives
| better. People should expect this, both as citizens and as
| tax payers. The government doesn't just get free money from
| the people without being expected to offer something in
| return.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the
| state almost anywhere, they just aren't fucked doing so (we
| have this issue in Ireland)."
|
| This seems to not reflect reality in the US. There is strong
| local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor
| people or worse homeless, leading to tight zoning and rejection
| of projects during the byzantine approval process. If the
| government tries to build something, the EPA (environmental
| protection act) also allows anyone to request that a
| environmental impact study needs to take place. The study can
| take about a year and there are no teeth, other than causing
| delay and cost through the study. Nothing needs to change based
| on the findings, it's just another way to drag things out and
| increase cost on projects someone doesn't like.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, probably was not intended when that was passed that all
| the world's endangered species would happen to be found near
| wealthy people's homes.
| Animats wrote:
| > There is strong local resistance to construction especially
| if it's for poor people, or worse, homeless,
|
| The US used to do that. It led to high-rise ghettos.[1] And
| that was before drugs were big.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| Cabrini Green is the more infamous example, I think.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini-Green_Homes
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Honestly, social housing isn't my preferred solution. My
| solution is radical upzoning; removal of minimum unit-
| sizes; drastically simplify the approval/permit process and
| remove all local hearings etc. from the process, if it fits
| the regulations, you can build it; forced rehab for
| addicts; institutionalize mentally ill who cannot take care
| of themselves (this is the hardest part, I am least certain
| about).
| mjevans wrote:
| Disagree on 'minimum unit sizes', at least where I live
| 0-bedroom loft-only units are already small enough!
|
| I do agree with other ideas that promote more flexible
| application of possibly small units.
|
| Ideas such as 'fire proof' (no flammable materials in
| building construction) buildings with relaxed regulations
| about access to egress, so that stupid middle hallway can
| be removed.
|
| Very agree with an easier and known approval if checking
| the boxes process. Local hearings banned, environmental
| impacts should be part of the zoning for a given plot;
| fit 'within the lines' and no re-assessment.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| In a way, the US "handles" it very efficiently, but only in
| terms of spending the money and funnel them to the related
| interest group, but not in terms of solving the homeless
| problem.
|
| Because for them, problem is their opportunity.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and
| you are just sinking billions into it without making any
| measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
|
| Well, that's simple. Most of the money goes to politically well
| connected non-profits with missions around alleviating
| homelessness. The problem is that if you alleviate
| homelessness, the money goes away and everybody at that non-
| profit loses their jobs. I'm not specifically accusing anyone
| of corruption, but the incentives aren't good.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| >The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money
| goes away
|
| That actually isn't what happens at all though. When we
| handle this at the state level, spending on homelessness just
| makes that state more attractive to the homeless in other
| states and exacerbates the problem.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The funny thing is, you don't even need corruption. Every
| single one person in those GONGOs could be genuinely willing
| to help the homeless. The problem is, if their financing is
| detached from whether their strategies are successful - and
| even smart and honest people have great capacity for self-
| delusion, which is only enhanced when the mission is morally
| laudable - then the money could be wasted as thoroughly as if
| they were corrupt.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| It's a very simple cycle.
|
| The state spends money to help the homeless.
|
| The broad availability of help for the homeless increases the
| likelihood that homeless will migrate to and stay in the state.
|
| Repeat.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-
| population.ht...
|
| > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass
| on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
|
| > "This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem," said
| Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles
| Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the
| largest homeless census count in the country.
|
| > L.A.H.S.A.'s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of
| the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing
| homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
|
| CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in
| the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider
| you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years.
|
| Edit: Reply to paisawalla
|
| May I point out the post I replied to had no data. If you
| have data that addresses the two points you made, please post
| them. It is always easy to nitpick data when you have none.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Besides what the other person said, given that California
| is in fact, the most populous state, it seems obvious to me
| that what I said can be true while the majority of homeless
| in the state still originate from the state...
| paisawalla wrote:
| Data which is
|
| 1) based on self-reported status
|
| 2) fails to distinguish between temporary hardship
| homelessness and that resulting of addiction/illness
|
| Should not be relied upon. For the first, there is an
| obvious incentive towards exaggerating one's stay in state,
| and no counter-incentive whatsoever. For the latter, these
| are two separate problems which need drastically different
| solutions.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| The people don't want to be not homeless.
| zumu wrote:
| I've decided most homeless social programs are a trap. By
| locating these programs in the centers of the highest cost of
| living cities, we can't reasonably expect them to succeed,
| assuming success is actually getting people housed and back on
| their feet. We need to encourage people to move some place they
| have a chance in hell of getting out of poverty.
|
| Centering these programs in rich city centers is a failed policy
| and needs to be scrapped.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| In some cases, these are indirect corporate subsidies. After
| all, who will work in low-paying jobs in SF, if they have to
| live far far away?
|
| Where could people move that would give them more
| opportunities? Rural areas often lack the social resources to
| support people in more precarious situations, and big cities is
| where the opportunities are.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| Interesting idea, but do homeless folks actually end up
| working for corporations? They have a hard enough time
| getting any job in the first place (and remaining presentable
| enough for their job if they do get one)
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Homelessness affects a ton of people, but I'm also
| including who live in subsidized housing (and otherwise
| might be homeless).
|
| It could be a family with kids, who need a subsidy to live
| in a big-enough place, or an old person living off a tiny
| pension. etc
| nightshadetrie wrote:
| NIMBY's: Why are there so many homeless? NIMBY's: No, don't build
| housing. It'll decrease my home value!
|
| Can't have it both ways .
| bryantraywick wrote:
| $17B could have built a lot of affordable subsidized, or free,
| housing.
| Brainfood wrote:
| LA resident since 2015. I have a proposed solution that no one
| ever seems to bring up on here but I would love to know the HN
| response to this:
|
| If a big essential part of the American Dream is home ownership,
| and we are short on homes, why do we allow corporations to own
| them all? How about we have a middle ground or cap on size of
| corporate entity and # of units or something?
|
| Some of the argument seems to be stuck on free housing for
| everyone, and everyone else seems fine allowing faceless
| corporations to own everything and turn us all into renters.
|
| I know I'm leaving out plenty of specifics of how this would
| work. But the basic concept is same - people (not companies)
| should own housing. Let me know your thoughts.
|
| My first ever HN comment so hopefully this is seen.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Corporations buy homes to rent them out. This is neutral for
| housing supply.
|
| The real issue is a growth in households but a lack of growth
| in housing stock. We need to build more housing.
| reillyse wrote:
| Well one problem is once corporations get involved is money
| starts flowing to influence Politicians to do the Corps
| bidding. So, I wouldn't say it's neutral.
| TehShrike wrote:
| My understanding is that most houses in the US are owned by the
| people who live in them.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Large corporations don't actually own many homes. It is true
| that they started buying them during covid, but that is mostly
| because they realized they are extremely good investments due
| zoning making it hard to build them. In order for housing to be
| affordable it can't be an investment. It needs to maintain its
| real value over time, meaning the wage to price ratio remains
| constant. If housing wasn't a good investment it wouldn't be
| owned by corporations. So I'd say your idea is on the right
| track, but just misses the last step which is just make housing
| affordable by allowing it to be built.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Are people homeless because they could afford rent, but rather
| be homeless if they cannot buy? Further, if the rental market
| was saturated, it wouldn't pay off anymore to buy rental units.
| If the demand for rental is just there because there is nothing
| to buy, it's a clear indicator that there just isn't enough
| housing (in the desired places). Ultimately the answer will
| always remain that we need to build more housing. We haven't
| built enough in decades and it will take a long time to catch
| up, especially if we don't start on it. We need to relax
| zoning, remove minimum unit sizes and make it quick and
| predictable to get approval for new construction. Right now,
| many of the neighborhoods we love so much would be illegal to
| build today.
| philwelch wrote:
| So a lot of corporate-owned housing is only in that state
| transitionally. If a corporate developer builds a condo
| building or a suburban subdivision, they own all those homes
| because they built them, but their intent is to sell those
| homes and divest themselves from it entirely. When a bank
| forecloses on a home, they're in the same situation.
|
| What's left when you account for all of that is apartment
| buildings. Individual people can own apartment buildings, but
| only if they're significantly wealthy, and even then they'll
| want to outsource the actual management of the building.
| Theoretically you can convert apartment buildings to condo
| buildings, but there are still a lot of people who want to rent
| rather than buy at any particular point in time so it might not
| make sense to do that.
|
| Furthermore, I don't think theres any corporate conspiracy to
| turn us all into renters in the first place.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| the key to solving homelessness is not affordable housing,
| regulation or vast amounts of spending or even UBI. The answer is
| UBL ==> Universal basic Land. It's the idea that every person
| should have some means of having some land and being allowed to
| build on it. maybe not in downtown, maybe not any specific area,
| but at least somewhere. you can't just tell people to whole up in
| a homeless shelter. I found out that the life expectency of the
| average homeless person is in their 40s, Yikes! there should be
| someplace for everyone on this planet. give people some land, or
| let them buy it for a relatively reasonable amount and don't
| charge them rent (property taxes), at least for up to a certain
| value (say the first 50K or 100k). Once you have land, and
| freedom to build on it, you can build your home or have a
| construction company do it for you, in a way that's cost
| effective.
|
| Even the native american indians and countless others in the
| global south with far less income per capita had/have homes. It
| shouldn't be so hard: the problem is land use policy and
| regulations.
| tormeh wrote:
| Mandatory Wendover Productions video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ngms6iRa14
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Individual states cannot address most social issues, this is a
| known issue. This is why 101 issues like education and healthcare
| REQUIRE federal action.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It worked for everyone who got a cut of that $17B
| eloisant wrote:
| not if they're still homeless
| ugjka wrote:
| I heard it is so bad that foreigners regret their vacation trips
| to California, particularly San Francisco
| herbst wrote:
| That's not new tho. The 'romantic' idea of travelling to the us
| always comes with the ugly taste of open poorness, public drug
| consumptions and general inhumane behaviour to their homeless
| and sick.
|
| It's not only SF or Cali that has this image at this point.
| It's kinda hard to overlook when this simply does not exist
| where you are from.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Hey, there's more to the US than that for visitors. Don't
| forget that we're also globally known for our racism and gun
| crimes!
| jxramos wrote:
| I've seen street interviews on Youtube or maybe Twitter where
| they come up to tourists and ask them how they're enjoying
| their trip and catch any feedback. Sad replies.
| mstratman wrote:
| Reason TV did an interesting video recently looking at several
| angles of homelessness:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZhmUfDePE
|
| There are a lot of things you can take from it, but one
| overarching opinion is that "housing first" gets in the way of
| helping those who are down on their luck and find themselves
| hopefully-temporarily without a home (as opposed to those who
| cannot or will not work to change their situation).
|
| It makes the case you need multiple approaches to deal with the
| vastly different homeless situations.
|
| Check it out.
| abdellah123 wrote:
| you can build cities with that money ... with businesses and
| schools and what not ! governance
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| It seems to be working quite well, they have a lot of
| homelessness!
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| My priors are that if the WSJ is making obviously BS headlines in
| the format "California spent <big number> on something. It
| failed" then California is likely half-heartedly doing the right
| thing and should do more of it.
|
| And is likely saving money compared with whatever the WSJ is
| pushing as an alternative.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Half the dysfunction with political efforts to ameliorate
| homelessness is the toxicity of touching a difficult issue.
| Homelessness is beyond any one term or individual to solve.
| Certainly you cannot cure the addictions, disabilities or madness
| of these unfortunate people overnight. The only solution people
| would actually like is if the homeless were to disappear.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| And the resolution has been terrible. Politicians (and voters)
| pick a position. They act on it, or don't. But, nothing is ever
| planned executed at a scale where it is expected to solve or
| make a visible dent in the problem as a whole.
|
| So maybe your "position" is "housing first." It's popular,
| backed by academia, and it goes ahead.
|
| At this point, resource efficiency, overall scale of impact and
| such don't matter. The action is "housing first" or it's
| "community centred" or "drug-free," "Jesus saves" or
| whatever... and that's enough. Ideology>efficacy when you don't
| expect to get anywhere anyway.
|
| These big, ideologically charged, "toxic" issues are such that
| no one expects to "solve" them. So, they act at the operational
| level spending whatever resources they have without real
| strategics. Strategy becomes replaced with abstractions.
| polalavik wrote:
| first sane response - yes its a generational to multi
| generational problem. We are dealing with the outcome of
| decisions made long ago. There are now two issues: (1) all the
| currently homeless (2) the people in the pipeline to be
| homeless. The people homeless now require a completely
| different solution than the "pipeline" of people we need to
| help stay out of homelessness.
|
| Unfortunately, politics is too short sighted to ever solve an
| issue that will truly take a decade+ of good policy to fix.
| And, as you mentioned, tackling the _now_ problem is almost too
| toxic to touch, politically. Rock and a hard place.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| I can solve it in under a year.
|
| These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to
| maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern
| humanity.
|
| They should either be forcefully institutionalised or
| forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
|
| Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows
| this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast
| thrown away to some dark corner under a bridge or street.
| drewcoo wrote:
| I hope there's also room in those institutions to try to
| reform sociopaths with draconian ideas about social problems.
|
| If not, I want to play Judge Dredd this time!
| pc_edwin wrote:
| I don't get how these ideas are draconian.
|
| Forget the fact that its whats the most liberal countries
| do, what else do you propose?
|
| Whats draconian is the current state of affairs. Letting
| these people rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our
| cities, nobody wins here.
|
| These people need help and those who don't need help are
| knowingly causing public harm. Public harm as in harming
| the public in the public spaces where the public pays
| ungodly amounts of taxes to keep them safe.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > I can solve it in under a year... forcefully
| institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for
| repeat offence.
|
| Yes, if you criminalize homelessness and imprison all the
| homeless in hospitals and prisons, I think you've technically
| solved homelessness. Your problem though is that to do so,
| you've gone full fascist, so now there's a new problem.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| In a way we don't disagree. I think citizens would be quite
| happy with a solution which makes the homeless invisible by
| sequestering them. Its probably also the best for the health
| of these people. But remember how we got here. Reagan shut
| down the asylums because they were expensive, messy and
| "inhumane". 20 years after reinstitutionalizing we will
| lament the cost of sedation and imprisonment.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| California spent $4 billion a year on homelessness. Thats
| roughly $35,000 per homeless person (115,000).
|
| IMO it shouldn't even that much to
| institutionalise/imprison/forcefully remove these people
| but even if it did cost as much or more, it would still be
| worth it.
|
| Imagine what would clean safe streets do for these cities,
| it would create such a huge rebound!
| kerkeslager wrote:
| As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes
| for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to
| solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make
| people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless.
|
| Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who
| is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions,
| to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and having an indoor bed to
| sleep on doesn't solve that. HN people who have never experienced
| housing insecurity in their lives will wax poetic about how many
| homeless turn down help because they turn down shelters, but this
| is a totally wrong, ignorant, and compassionless take. Homeless
| people turn down shelters because for many homeless, shelters
| aren't help--they're worse than sleeping on the street. Shelters
| are at best a mild alleviation of suffering for those homeless
| for whom the tradeoffs of living in a shelter are worth it.
|
| The solution to homelessness is not mental health services:
| mental health services are totally ineffective when one is
| suffering the ongoing trauma of homelessness. Mental health
| services are a much needed measure to prevent people from
| becoming homeless in the first place, but they're utterly
| ineffective in getting people who are homeless into homes.
|
| The solution to homelessness is homes. Period.
|
| The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive
| down the prices of housing, and that would hurt the pocketbooks
| of people with power and money. That's why no money is being
| invested into solving homelessness. Until we as a society stop
| blindingly trusting rich people to be benevolent, this problem
| (and any other problem which rich people benefit from) will not
| be solved.
| jrowen wrote:
| Interesting points. Are there more effective programs elsewhere
| that build more hospitable/restorative spaces? Put another way,
| are there organizations doing "the right thing" based on the
| most current research?
|
| Having lived and worked near a lot of homeless people it's
| fascinated me for years but aside from volunteering a few times
| have not delved too deeply into the issue.
|
| Anecdotally, much of the "disturbance" created by the homeless
| seems to stem from a small number of individuals that many
| would describe as "too far gone." Is that a fair take and is
| there an effective solution to that?
|
| What is a reasonable estimate for the percentage of homeless
| that more or less prefer living peacefully on the street as
| long as they can get by? Is this a segment to be specifically
| facilitated, are there efforts to do so?
| jdjsbaosbs wrote:
| > shelters are not homes > Solution to homelessness is not
| mental health services > Solution to homelessness is homes.
| Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless...
|
| I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so
| we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and
| should focus on giving homes.
|
| How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property
| and give it to people without homes? We obviously do not have
| unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with
| a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. What
| duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for
| maintainence of the home/appliances etc. Now, if I am working
| hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would
| that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the
| criteria to get a free home? What about the people who do not
| qualify, Wil they still be homeless? If I get a free home,
| what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder
| to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Also where
| should these homes be? Should they all be in urban areas like
| SF or perhaps in smaller cities/towns where the homes are
| cheaper? Which neighborhoods should these homes be in?
|
| I don't know what the solution to homelessness is, but this
| doesn't seem like a viable solution.
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| You didn't go into depth enough about why shelters are bad.
| They're not even a mild alleviation to living on the street,
| they're actually worse. There are homeless criminals who go to
| shelters just to steal from other homeless. Many homeless
| become addicted in shelters. We spent $17b making the lives of
| the homeless _worse_.
| rcme wrote:
| > The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive
| down the prices of housing
|
| Giving homes to the homeless would increased demand for
| housing, which would increase the price of houses, no?
| jrowen wrote:
| I think they mean building mass affordable/free new housing
| rather than using existing stock.
| rcme wrote:
| The structures built on land usually depreciate over time.
| It's the land value that appreciates. So building new stock
| would still increase demand for land which would increase
| prices everywhere.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I don't think homes will help on their own.
|
| A more comprehensive system is needed. You get a place to stay
| and a living wage, even for doing absolutely nothing.
|
| Because otherwise, how are you going to recover?
|
| The second part that I think is really important is that we
| should look at this large country and do these things in places
| where there is space.
|
| Once can easily imagine a stretch of land north of Palmdale, CA
| where we can build hundreds of cheap houses connected to a
| couple of warehouses where we can treat people and where we can
| provide some sort of busywork for them. And yes, we'd be
| overpaying them. That's fine.
|
| But I think it's unreasonable for Los Angeles to try and get
| housing in this overheated market. It doesn't make sense,
| you're paying so much for so little.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| It's spent on scam charities that waste their resources handing
| out $75 boxes of syringes to junkies. You might as well set the
| money on fire--it would be less destructive than how the money is
| being spent now.
| senttoschool wrote:
| Everyone already knows that the more money California spends on
| homeless, the more of them will come to California.
|
| It's a service. The state/city that provides the best service for
| homeless people - that's where I will try to go if I don't have a
| home.
|
| Politicians don't seem to understand this. Or maybe they do, but
| they do the wrong thing in order to drum up politically correct
| votes.
|
| Take San Francisco. It spends $400m on homeless each year. With
| $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for
| every single one of them. Problem solved. Are you homeless? Make
| your way to San Francisco. The tax payers in the city will buy
| you a home in Idaho - no questions asked.
| f6v wrote:
| > With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in
| Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved.
|
| The problem is that people become homeless due to a number of
| reasons that include addiction, mental illness, trauma, loss of
| work, etc. It's not going to be solved by JUST providing them
| an apartment. At least not for everyone.
| atdrummond wrote:
| As someone who ended up homeless despite not fitting the
| typical profile - and has volunteered hundreds (possibly
| thousands) of hours in the space - you dramatically overstate
| the case for involuntary homelessness.
|
| There couldn't be a more significant difference between the
| homeless populations in places like SF and in other cities in
| the US with more sensible policies. There's massively more
| people in California who are there because they're
| voluntarily opting into a lifestyle where all of their
| capital expenditures are provided by taxpayers and they don't
| have to do anything to maintain them other than to remain
| homeless. Many of these people may seem insane due to their
| drug use but their mental issues are a result, not a cause;
| they're still rational actors responding to a perverse set of
| incentives.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Very frustrating to see the right blame the left for the
| homeless problem when the left are the only ones attempting to
| do anything about it.
| russdill wrote:
| Apparently if someone is hungry and you feed them, or if they
| are naked and you clothe then it's your own damn fault that
| people keep showing up.
| realjhol wrote:
| More like...
|
| - "when I was drug addicted you gave me cash"
|
| - "when I was stealing to fund my addictions, you made shop
| lifting legal for stolen items amounting to $1000 or less"
|
| - "when I was making violent threats, and assaulting
| members of the public you let me walk free"
|
| - "when the police tried to intervene you said they were
| systematically racist against people of color and should be
| defunded"
|
| - "when I had mental health issues, you closed down all the
| mental hospitals because you said they were oppressive
| institutions"
|
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
| senttoschool wrote:
| That's right. That's the hell hole San Francisco created.
| The city officials thought the tech tax money would never
| run out. Let's do extremely expensive feel-good,
| politically correct stuff to make people think we have a
| good heart.
| russdill wrote:
| What percentage is the budget do you imagine is being
| spent on homelessness?
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > "when I had mental health issues, you closed down all
| the mental hospitals because you said they were
| oppressive institutions"
|
| Wasn't that Reagan? Don't think that he was on the left.
| realjhol wrote:
| There's plenty of stupidity to go around
| realjhol wrote:
| The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the
| problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing
| than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and
| drug addiction with cash payments.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making
| the problem worse not better. It would be better to do
| nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize
| homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.
|
| It at least keeps people alive. The problem is that the
| _causes_ of homelessness are not addressed at all - there
| is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.
| realjhol wrote:
| > It at least keeps people alive.
|
| It may well keep people alive - in a way, but it's no
| solution if it creates a mass of people who are
| destroying themselves and the city community.
|
| It's still death - just in slow motion.
|
| > The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not
| addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough
| affordable housing stock.
|
| Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative
| solutions are required.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > It's still death - just in slow motion.
|
| Also known as life.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative
| solutions are required.
|
| And which ones, bar building housing, should that be?
|
| Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford
| a home (or being judged too unworthy of credit by three
| ultra-large black box corporations) is inhumane and costs
| the government way more than just giving them outright
| cash.
|
| Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues _and_
| there 's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of
| favour - it's ripe for abuse.
|
| And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts
| the problem elsewhere.
| realjhol wrote:
| > Locking them up for the crime of not being able to
| afford a home
|
| But we should lock them up for the crime of doing crime:
| dealing drugs, drunk and disorderly, assault, robbery,
| theft etc.
|
| > and costs the government way more than just giving them
| outright cash.
|
| The cut-price solution is clearly no solution at all.
|
| > Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and
| there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of
| favour - it's ripe for abuse.
|
| These people meed help, and a drug-free environment is a
| place they can receive that help.
|
| > And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts
| the problem elsewhere.
|
| There are other places where some of these people (the
| ones without crippling mental health issues) stand a far
| better chance of building a stable life for themselves
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Seriously mentally ill and addicted should be
| involuntarily committed. I know that's a big decision and
| will lead to abuse but the alternative of just having
| them roam the streets is worse. The "temporarily
| homeless" as I like to call them, those who want to be
| productive but have fallen on hard times, deserve access
| to affordable housing. The government can build huge
| amounts of tiny apartments to give these people, it
| worked in Chicago until they recently gave up and
| converted those units.
| shuckles wrote:
| Houston has gotten more people off the streets in the last
| decade than San Francisco or Los Angeles.
| zhte415 wrote:
| > Martin cited a study from May 2018 by the Los Angeles
| Homeless Services Authority, which found 75 percent of the
| people on the street in Los Angeles County had a home in that
| same county before they lost it. It also showed that 65 percent
| of the unsheltered homeless had lived in that county for at
| least 20 years. Only 13 percent were from out of state.
|
| Source:
| https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...
|
| Everyone knows, in the lyrics of Leonard Cohen -
|
| Everybody knows the good guys lost
|
| Everybody knows the fight was fixed
|
| The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
|
| That's how it goes Everybody knows
| zumu wrote:
| Those stats are outdated and generally somewhat dubious--what
| was the methodology here? Nonetheless, it is clear CA
| generates a lot of homeless. The linked study from 2018
| claimed 52,765 homeless in LA county, while the count by the
| same group performed in 2022 tallied 69,144. Either there's a
| been a massive influx of people on the streets or their
| methodology is improving. Perhaps both. Pretty wild to think
| about.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Population keeps growing and prices keep going up. Native
| californians are being displaced onto the streets.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Well...
|
| The logical (and operative) end of this thought process is
| "make them miserable and they'll leave."
|
| Some/many politicians do implement these kinds of policies, but
| you'll rarely hear the quite part out loud.
|
| Nasty problems breed dishonesty. Humane homeless policies
| increases homelessness, and the visibility of homelessness...
| especially if homeless migration is prevalent.
|
| The inhumane homelessness reduction policy is "abuse homeless
| people, then some will go away" No one wants to admit the other
| side of whatever coin they like. C'est la politique.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| This ignores the fact that many of the homeless have other
| problems than just a lack of a roof over their heads. Drug
| addiction and untreated mental health issues are common (and
| overlap); domestic violence is another (related) cause for some
| of the homeless. Many of these issues don't go away by throwing
| houses at the problem.
|
| Anyhow the main problem with the Idaho idea, beyond the
| politics/optics: what about getting the homeless into jobs? I
| don't think Idaho is overflowing with those, and I expect some
| of the homeless will be better off of employed.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Does that free apartment in Idaho also come with food, drug
| treatment, social services, and at least the remote possibility
| of actually getting a job, all in Idaho?
| senttoschool wrote:
| Probably. You can even hire people to guard them, feed them,
| try to bring them back to society slowly.
| abeppu wrote:
| What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such
| inefficient ways.
|
| A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty
| affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article
| says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields
| around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month,
| and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr,
| or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market
| rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on
| inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities
| could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting
| people in them.
|
| Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important
| factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if
| they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding
| down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live.
|
| Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption,
| where organizations that provide 'services' have good
| relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness"
| concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of
| an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an
| apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the
| frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax
| dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my
| neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put
| them into homes.
|
| https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed
| look at why housing first is doomed to failure.
|
| In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and
| housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are
| homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has
| hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-
| addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable
| (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse).
|
| For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental
| illness or drug abuse, treatment _first_ is the only viable
| solution, but we 're not legally allowed to force someone into
| treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger
| to themselves or others.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling
| everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-
| diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be
| arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type
| program for violating the laws that make them incompatible.
| Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory'
| policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like
| property damage and illegal drug use.
|
| [0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course
| would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal
| and ethical reasons.
| abeppu wrote:
| > For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental
| illness or drug abuse
|
| Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a
| constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?
| abeppu wrote:
| The Skid Row Housing Trust situation does sound bleak, but
| insofar as "housing first" is meant to provide a safe and
| stable environment that can enable other kinds of life
| improvements, I dunno that the housing they were providing
| fits the bill.
|
| > its portfolio is heavily weighted with early 20th century
| hotels with tiny living spaces, communal bathrooms and
| kitchens
|
| > Residents complain that lax security allows intruders to
| have easy access to the building and that one resident
| disrupts the entire building.
|
| > While giving a tour of the building to a Times reporter,
| a tenant pushed open the disruptive man's door
|
| > Residents of the Hart alleged they frequently had to use
| buckets in their rooms as toilets.
|
| > Los Angeles County departments of health services and
| mental health warned the trust of habitability and safety
| issues that were causing clients to decline housing in its
| buildings
|
| Suppose you live in one of these, and every time you go to
| the bathroom or the kitchen, you feel unsafe (anyone could
| be in the building), or are going to encounter various
| triggers (how much harder is it to get clean if there's
| drug use still all around you?), and are still subject to a
| lot of stress, disruption and uncertainty caused by your
| living situation. It seems like this organization was
| ambitious in the number of people it could house, but took
| real compromises in the quality of that housing. And it
| depended on very high occupancy to be financially even
| close to viable.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-26/skid-
| row...
| bombcar wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-
| homeless-...
|
| There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority
| of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six
| weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job".
|
| It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and
| those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug
| abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately
| because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up
| others in the net.
| josho wrote:
| I think on this issues it's conservatives that make a solution
| untenable.
|
| Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space.
| So that kills any housing first policies.
|
| The alternative has to be something that a politician can
| sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up
| for re-election that there won't be any obvious fraud or abuse.
| Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then
| their political ambitions likely get killed.
|
| This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead
| has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost
| effective with worse outcomes.
|
| My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10%
| fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people.
| But yeh that won't happen either because their political
| opponents will distort that 10% and say the government
| purposely threw that money away.
| bluGill wrote:
| We are talking about California - the conservatives don't
| have power.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Conservatives are going to be against giving out living
| space
|
| To play the devil's advocate to my sibling commentators: if
| you equate "conservative" politics and NIMBY politics, this
| claim could certainly hold some substance. (The argument:
| NIMBY = conservative in the sense that they oppose change.)
|
| Also, just off the cuff I'm going to bet the overhead/fraud
| rate is more like 50% than 10%. Basis: think of the overhead
| regular companies budget, about 30% of salary.
| jjcon wrote:
| > I think on this issues it's conservatives that make a
| solution untenable
|
| Uhhh it's been a while since I lived in the states but isn't
| homelessness much much worse in states dominated by liberals?
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10%
| fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people.
| But yeh that won't happen either because their political
| opponents will distort that 10% and say the government
| purposely threw that money away.
|
| For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is
| happening now?
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| marcusverus wrote:
| California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant
| governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state
| house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major
| cities.
|
| Conservatives are not the problem.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| The Democratic party, especially at the local and state
| level, is almost always dominated by conservatives. Every
| election with low turnout skews conservative, and local
| elections frequently have <10% turnout.
| kristopolous wrote:
| How is policy directed?
|
| I'm in Los Angeles and it's mostly by business and real
| estate interests.
|
| Republicans, like Rick Caruso, run as Democrats because
| that's how you get elected here. It's a meaningless label.
|
| They'll do culture war signaling like support for pride
| month to their Twitter feed but when it comes to actual
| policy, for instance, the "defunding" of the LAPD which
| just last month included 780 more police, a new helicopter
| ... https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ an
| increase of $118,000,000, it's a different story.
|
| On homelessness, actual leftists advocate for strong
| regulation on housing costs, bans on speculation,
| criminalization of landlords who do illegal evictions,
| seizing of idle real estate for redistributive housing,
| things like that.
|
| You may disagree, but that's what the actual left position
| is. It's not buying new helicopters for the cops or giving
| them 100 million to do encampment sweeps where they throw
| away medication and wheelchairs and then classify it as
| "homeless abatement".
|
| The policy, in practice, is increased money for police,
| shelters without storage or mail services, encampment
| sweeps, and a blind eye to landlord and market forces. In a
| Venn diagram with most conservative approaches, it's a
| pretty significant crossover.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| There is only one party in the US: Business Money. There
| are two different culture war teams to keep everyone
| distracted from that fact.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've long suspected with a bit of repackaging, many of
| the Republican voters could be sold on a pretty socialist
| platform and, counterintuitively, more of them than on
| the Democrat side.
|
| Morality, fiscal responsibility, small government, local
| control, you can paint policies like a city chartering
| its own bank, community banking, cooperative retail,
| housing trusts etc with the same brush. You can even
| package say, free college in terms of competition,
| industry, and nationalism. Call it something like
| "America winning" or "Competitive Edge" instead of "free
| college". It's an easy parlay. I'm surprised I don't see
| it more.
|
| I'm guessing the people attempting that gambit don't get
| the millions needed to run the campaigns.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > I think on this issues it's conservatives that make a
| solution untenable. > Conservatives are going to be against
| giving out living space. So that kills any housing first
| policies.
|
| I'm trying to figure out the basis for your argument...
| surely you aren't suggesting that places like California want
| to do this but can't seem to overcome the conservative
| opposition in the state legislature, right? :)
|
| See also : https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-
| inpractice-0... (one of the most conservative states in the
| country has been trying different housing first strategies
| for nearly two decades)
| meowtimemania wrote:
| We've tested housing first programs in SF.
| https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20
|
| 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets.
| We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational
| decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the
| streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do
| drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to
| rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and
| put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling
| drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated.
|
| I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should
| be supported in a much different way than we support drug
| addicts.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the
| streets.
|
| How many of those 25% would've died on the street? Do you
| have any numbers to put that into context?
|
| A 54% reduction in homeless on the streets sounds like a
| great start to me, though, as do people dying in a room
| instead of on a sidewalk.
| worik wrote:
| > 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the
| streets
|
| You are cherry picking statistics
|
| Housing first has been shown over and over again to be a
| better solution than expecting people to recover their lives
| before they get any help
|
| What are your counterfactuals? How many die with no help?
|
| Where do those numbers even come from?
|
| Basically I am calling this out as disinformation. Lies
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I'm quoting a tweet from the president of Y Combinator. I'm
| not against giving people housing, but I think there needs
| to be a sobriety requirement. Why would putting someone in
| a house cure them of their addiction? Put them through
| rehab, then give them a house when they leave rehab.
| kristofferR wrote:
| They use drugs because they live on the streets.
|
| Treating a symptom instead of the cause is stupid,
| especially if the symptom (drug use) will likely return
| as soon as they return to the streets after rehab/prison.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > They use drugs because they live on the streets.
|
| Have you ever used drugs? Drugs are fun. Until they
| aren't anymore, then they _cause_ problems, like becoming
| homeless. That drugs are mostly just a symptom of
| homelessness is such a weird assertion that keeps getting
| tossed around.
|
| This person likes doing drugs and has no intention to
| quit: https://archive.ph/wnTq6 But she'll happily take
| all the free stuff you want to give her. I'm not saying
| this is every homeless person. But let's not pretend like
| it's none of them either, and create policies
| accordingly.
|
| I'm all for housing first. But there needs to be a filter
| imo to pick only the people with an actual chance of
| success (which so far turns out to be a pretty low % in
| LA's program, but still great for those people and I'm
| all for it).
|
| Also there has to be some consideration for the
| working/lower class people who live in these
| neighborhoods. If the people making the policies and
| those making loftiest arguments online actually had to
| live amidst all the chaos, I think we'd see a very
| different approach.
| smsm42 wrote:
| A lot of them uses drugs because they are mentally ill,
| and this is their way to cope with it. People that aren't
| dangerous to anybody but themselves would not get treated
| involuntarily, and they would not follow voluntary
| treatments because drugs are easier. Living on the
| streets is a consequence too - it's hard to hold a job
| while being mentally ill addict, it's hard to pay rent
| while having no job, and it's hard to follow any rules
| framework which would be in place for a housing solution
| while being all the above.
| kristofferR wrote:
| I'm not arguing that the homeless should only receive
| housing, I'm saying that any other help you give them
| likely won't help unless you provide housing.
|
| And that help should include mental healthcare and a
| support structure.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| Parent didn't suggest returning them to the streets after
| rehab. They said give them free housing _after_ rehab.
|
| That being said, addiction is not easily cured with or
| without free housing, if the substance of addiction is
| easily available nearby (alcohol, drugs, casinos) without
| additional support systems.
| kristofferR wrote:
| This is a good article, with his cherry picked stats:
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-
| sros...
|
| Housing First is clearly the best strategy to solve
| homelessness, but it should not be confused with Housing
| Only, which the article has plenty of examples of.
|
| Using a mismanaged Housing First program to argue against
| Housing First is also borderline absurd, I agree with you
| there.
| ramblenode wrote:
| Rehab might be one of the least effective solutions of all
| [0]. If it's inpatient then you are paying for housing
| anyway, but without any of the benefits of stability that
| would allow someone to use it as a springboard to get a job.
|
| [0] https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/02/15/opioid-
| treatment...
| spurgu wrote:
| Or, let people build their own housing.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-home...
|
| Allocate some land for this, let people create their own
| community/ies. Isn't America supposed to be about freedom?
| dbrueck wrote:
| Utah has been doing a housing first program for about 20 years.
| It has definitely helped a lot of people, but it hasn't really
| solved the problem either.
|
| (I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe
| Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a
| bunch of other things - who knows).
|
| https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homel...
| aorloff wrote:
| We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have
| "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get
| off the street.
|
| But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations
| that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want
| to live without those rules even if it means living on the
| street.
| ncallaway wrote:
| What is the fraction of people that could have housing and
| are choosing not to receive it, and the fraction that would
| accept housing but has not been offered it?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain
| empty every night because they're located in "sober"
| facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol
| or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able
| to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's more than this though. Families can't stay together,
| belongings get stolen, safety can be an issue, you can't
| bring your pets, etc. There are a lot of reasons those
| kinds of shelter can't work for some people.
| ishjoh wrote:
| I live in a midsize city outside of California that has 3
| shelters downtown. 1 shelter dropped the sober requirement
| trying to house those people. They had to reinstate the
| rules within 24h because 2 employees had been assaulted,
| and a serious fight had broken out that required hospital
| care for both people involved. It is sad state of affairs.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yeah imagine if they allowed crack smoking or speed. No
| way. Heroin and fentanyl maybe.
| magicalist wrote:
| what city?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Cramming everyone who _isn 't_ sober into one facility is a
| bad idea? No shit, Sherlock!
|
| Maybe we should try treating people better than sardines.
| scythe wrote:
| One problem is the binary of "sober".
|
| Opioid substitution therapy has a long track record of
| effectiveness, but when treating homeless addicts we all
| too often insist they go through withdrawal, to nobody's
| benefit. Not all homeless are addicts, but an individual
| suffering opioid addiction has very different behavior from
| someone who isn't, and that requires particular attention.
| Opioids have the worst relapse rate of all addictive drugs.
|
| Stimulant withdrawal on the other hand is generally less
| severe, and acute stimulant intoxication is more likely to
| cause serious behavioral problems than with opioids (or
| methadone). Cocaine has a surprisingly low relapse rate,
| once sobriety is maintained for a few months.
|
| Alcohol is a little more difficult, because it not only has
| a dangerous withdrawal syndrome but it also causes
| aggressive or impulsive behavior. Treating withdrawal is
| imperative; substitution is difficult, since other
| anxiolytics can produce the same impulse control problems.
| Access to alcohol is pervasive, as well, and we would like
| to avoid constant monitoring.
|
| When we see only the possibilities of permissiveness or
| restriction and not active and detailed intervention, we
| are not playing with a full deck. As another commenter
| mentioned, simply allowing shelter residents to use drugs
| creates risks to other residents and staff. But we should
| be as accommodating as reasonably achievable.
| convolvatron wrote:
| another aspect here is that we're not just talking about
| users. in the areas I frequent in SF the homeless
| population has dropped a lot in the last year - except
| for the cooks and the dealers. they aren't giving up
| their only income stream.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a "missing middle" that we cannot provide in our
| current society. Nobody can provide "flop houses" where
| drugs and alcohol use are ignored unless you're harming
| someone, so there's nothing between sleeping rough under
| the bridge and being sober in a shelter.
|
| The liability alone would prevent any non-government agency
| from doing it, and even the government is scared.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The problem with flop houses that don't have drug and
| alcohol restrictions is that the other residents suffer
| and things fall apart quickly. These aren't people with
| great self control. Even homeless with drug and alcohol
| abuse problems will stay away from these places because
| they are too dangerous.
| bombcar wrote:
| Maybe they need to be separated by some distance.
|
| It won't be cheap (likely with security and other support
| staff you're looking at one or to staff per "homeless")
| but at some point something has to be done, or the status
| quo continues forever.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Why should government provide this? It creates a perverse
| incentive as we observe in modern day SF
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The context is getting people off the street. If we don't
| care about that, then no, it shouldn't.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because nobody else can provide it without being sued
| into oblivion.
| bombcar wrote:
| That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with
| because we got rid of institutionalization except in some
| (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively
| requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when
| it becomes too much of a big problem.
|
| I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and
| managed _slums_ - basically jails you can leave at any time.
| It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to
| be better than a tent under a bridge.
| bluGill wrote:
| We got rid of institutionalization for very good reason.
| Many of them outright abused the people under their care.
| Cleaning up the system is hard. Many of the homeless have
| mental issues such that they cannot figure out how to
| report abuse even if it would be listened to, and of course
| institutions have easy means to ensure you can't report
| things. (or you can report, but the person doing the abuse
| investigates and finds nothing wrong)
| shuckles wrote:
| It was a combination of abuses at psychiatric facilities
| and the belief that new drugs would "solve" mental health
| issues.
| bombcar wrote:
| We had problems with abuse in many institutions (schools,
| churches, nursing homes) but we didn't get rid of all
| those.
|
| It would cost, but you can externally monitor and correct
| institutions if you have entirely separate people doing
| it.
|
| Or - livestream everything and let the public monitor it.
| (Obviously this can't be done for various reasons, but we
| now have the technology to literally record it all.)
| suzzer99 wrote:
| The other argument is that it seems fundamentally wrong
| to incarcerate someone against their will who isn't a
| danger to society.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Implying that if you don't want to live in rule based
| housing you should be institutionalized ?
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the root of the question - should someone of
| sound mind and body be prohibited from sleeping rough?
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Then figure out what rules can and cannot work. I listened to
| a podcast were a vet's fucking service dog disallowed him
| from getting into rehab. A service dog!
| hackernewds wrote:
| Disallowed him is a neat framing for, he made a hard
| conscious choice.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Let people have _something_. Let them have _one
| persistent thing_ that they care about and care for. It's
| a dog.
| felix_n wrote:
| You probably still won't get it, but replace "dog" with
| "kid" or "friend" and say that sentence again. That might
| give you a sense of how attached a lot of people are to
| their dogs.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Service animals are medical equipment my dude. It would
| be as immoral as claiming someone can only go to rehab if
| they give up their insulin or their wheelchair.
| foobiekr wrote:
| It really depends on if it's an actual service dog or one
| of the emotional support animals.
| axus wrote:
| Why does the housing need rules, if it's "single-family
| homes"?
| abeppu wrote:
| It's not a binary.
|
| SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does
| not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from
| our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding
| to specific categories, the largest of which was for
| permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5
| years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to
| buy available units -- it will only consider developing new
| projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have
| extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to
| rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are
| available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it
| could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped
| sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into
| empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent
| in parking lot safe sleeping sites.
|
| Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside
| for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and
| prevention services.
|
| Funding exists to put more people into actual housing
| basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more
| shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
| shuckles wrote:
| Most of the $5k/tent was in the services required for a
| high-needs population. As someone who has been impacted by
| a building set on fire by a meth addicted neighbor, simply
| placing high needs homeless people who often have serious
| mental health or drug abuse issues, in apartments isn't the
| end of the story. In many cases, it makes the lives of
| other residents of the building worse, as evidenced by the
| issues (including high rate of nuisance evictions) plaguing
| SROs in SF.
|
| Santa Clara County tried a random assignment housing first
| experiment in 2021 where homeless people given apartments
| died at roughly the same rates from drug overdose, etc.
| than homeless people who didn't receive housing.
|
| For these reasons and more, it makes a lot of sense to not
| acquire one-off units in existing buildings for PSH, and
| Prop C set asides for PSH instead of shelter or whatever
| the city deemed most useful for homeless people is kind of
| downstream of nonprofit politics and not a statement about
| voter mandates or what's best for homeless people.
| km3r wrote:
| I'm glad they aren't just buying up existing housing stock.
| We have a housing shortage, and subsidizing demand will
| just further send prices up for everyone else. Net new
| housing, even if more expensive, will do far more good
| overall.
| abeppu wrote:
| I'm all for net new housing. And I think we should green-
| light new residential projects faster. But telling
| currently homeless people to _wait_ for new projects to
| be planned and built, when there's already a glut of
| vacant condos struggling to sell seems cruel. I'm not
| saying the city needs to bid aggressively -- but when the
| market slows down, why not get a deal?
| worik wrote:
| > But we also have some "service resistant" homeless
| populations
|
| Plenty of peoples in the WSJ story were not "service
| resistant"
|
| The services are inadequate
| hackernewds wrote:
| Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with
| mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money
| directly does not help them.
|
| Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts
| barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the
| people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
| Spivak wrote:
| Edit: Unlike the sibling poster I _am_ saying it give it to
| them directly.
|
| I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up
| with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from that
| $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in
| perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no
| they do _drugs_?! like the heaviest drug users I 've ever met
| aren't white collar.
|
| Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to
| relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford
| all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills
| and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary
| spending every month.
|
| Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that
| would be life changing to the average american _household_
| per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn 't change
| lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some
| sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless
| folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been
| traumatized by homelessness and stuck.
|
| In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't
| spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna
| be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new
| wife.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Definitely giving them $4700/month no strings attached will
| solve the problem quickly. I get it, white collar people
| are the heaviest drug users, but the fent will kill them in
| the street in a couple of months. That's just $10,400
| spent, which is much better than where we are now. It is,
| however, a very dark solution, and not humane at all.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| That's kinda what's happened in some pilot programs in
| SF.
|
| "Of the 515 residents the city tracked in permanent
| housing since 2016, 25% died, while 21% returned to the
| streets."
|
| https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s
| =20
|
| Not sure why someone would return to the streets but the
| 25% death rate is insane.
| abeppu wrote:
| I'm _not_ saying give them the money directly.
|
| > Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet
| experts barge it with their own theories and expertise,
| rather than the people who have studied and dedicated
| themselves for decades.
|
| I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial
| stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first"
| has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even
| when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of
| clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF
| parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have
| not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping
| sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot
| for them.
| seiferteric wrote:
| IMO The issue is that anytime more money becomes available, CA
| government/bureaucracy sucks it up. Lots of state jobs created
| to run these programs that ultimately do little good. Seems
| more like middle class jobs program than actually attempting to
| solve the problem.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| If you build it, they will come.
|
| Turn your city into a homeless paradise, act surprised when
| homeless people show up.
| vmfunction wrote:
| with $17B, we can literally 3D print a bunch of micro housing.
| Seems like money is still wasted in Bureaucrat, red tap and some
| kind financial fraud.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Well, the issue is also because homelessness isn't caused
| because people don't have a home.
|
| People could move to the midwest and live very cheaply if that
| were the issue.
|
| The true cause of homelessness is mostly mental health issues,
| at least in these big cities.
| boucher wrote:
| This is an often repeated and false claim.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Well it's not false, in that it would be extremely cheap
| for someone to just go live in the mid west.
|
| Or do you think buying bus tickets for people is some sort
| of impossible to do thing?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| With that level of money, you could hire lots of smart people
| to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem.
|
| You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide
| data. And then you could use that money to implement small
| scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still
| have billions left over.
|
| For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works,
| and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| You don't even need any sort of novel new technology. We could
| build housing out of wood just like we have for hundreds of
| years.
|
| The main problem is that new housing is largely banned as
| established wealth that already have detached homes vote for
| politicians that promise to not allow any new homes near them.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but how do you reasonably stop fires in
| attached wood homes from becoming a huge problem fast?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Fire code and building code, like everywhere else in the
| US. It isn't like the US has nonstop city wide fires raging
| on for decades.
| jxramos wrote:
| I've heard it called the homelessness industrial complex, that
| was from some City Journal article someone posted to HN some
| years back that introduced me to that publication. It was a
| shocking thing to contemplate but yah with that sum of money
| what exactly do we have to show for it?
| polski-g wrote:
| If you're being paid by the government to manage homeless
| people, your incentive is to keep them homeless. Else your
| contact would end.
| goles wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on not understanding it" - Upton
| Sinclair
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| This same nonsense logic would apply to the police, firemen
| and nurses too. Are the firemen out there discouraging
| sprinkler systems because they want to keep their jobs?
|
| Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical,
| purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the
| homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit
| from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the
| street.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| All those other professions have preventative value. It
| is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters -
| the incentives are rightly aligned to make it temporary
| to keep down costs. Involving private outfits as
| contractors, just as with private prisons, skews the
| incentives terribly. (I also have nothing against private
| healthcare, security, or fire houses as a luxury spend
| for those who want it.)
| jxramos wrote:
| yah, and I can see this being true of any effort to remove
| something negative from society. What do you do next when
| satisfactorily eliminate it and how do you test when that
| negative thing has not sufficiently retreated for a given
| effort. How do you differentiate spinning wheels when
| someone doesn't want to advance and is intentionally idling
| burning the hours and when the problem is just downright
| difficult.
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| bullen wrote:
| Good to see that the archive link is now posted on top but why
| not replace the original URL?
|
| I understand that you need to avoid multiples but still should be
| possible to do both at the same time.
|
| I don't know which posts need a paywall workaround before I click
| the comments.
|
| So like it works now, I will always click comments first.
|
| ----
|
| And to the subject, journalists (and humanists in general) don't
| understand that homelessness is sometimes a self inflicted
| predicament.
|
| It's a moral fight for respect and responsibility and money can
| buy neither.
|
| Basically governments need money to have value, even if it is
| proven to be useless.
|
| They can't solve the real problem which is that moneys value is
| backed violence.
|
| And energy backs that violence today more than ever previously in
| history and in the future.
|
| The society we have has to change now because we don't have the
| coal, oil and gas to feed the violence that backs the value of
| money.
|
| Ultimately war is money and money is war.
|
| Eventually as energy peaks, kings will be beggars and beggars
| will be kings.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Society refusing to draw a link between the homelessness/addition
| crisis in the States and the pharmaceutical companies becoming
| drug dealers/pushers of opioids that flooded the country is
| honestly shocking.
|
| Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans became opioid
| addicts because they were prescribed unnecessary pills by their
| own doctors, and became hooked (the risks of opioids have been
| known for what, thousands of years?). We have barely given the
| pharma industry a slap on the wrist for the harm they've caused
| and the direct link between the two crises is never drawn in the
| public sphere.
| datadeft wrote:
| "Government spent X on Y and it does not work"
|
| I guess this is a theme.
| max182 wrote:
| Moved from Ventura/Santa Barbara to Palm Beach FL, due to the
| alot of shortcomings that California has faced. Witnessing
| several overdoses outside my condo near the beach was the final
| straw for me. Too heavy to be around. I still miss the contrast
| of the beach and mountains, but since after the Pandemic, things
| just didn't feel the same in California. I hope things can turn
| around in but it seems like there are issues that stem from the
| highest offices of government and go beyond the issue of
| homelessness.
|
| Palm Beach is pretty cool, West Palm Beach/Jupiter area reminds
| me a lot of Santa Barbara. West Palm Beach to Miami is about the
| same distance from Ventura to LA. You get a lot of the benefits
| of Miami without being directly in the madness. A lot of young
| professionals working in Finance and Tech in Miami are moving to
| West Palm because of the new BrightLine train that goes from
| downtown WPB to downtown Miami.
|
| I haven't really got out much and explored due to crazy workload,
| but want to start attending meet ups here and meet some people my
| age. A lot of the problems that I had with California, don't
| really exist, at least to the same degree, out here. It's pretty
| comfy.
| Reptur wrote:
| Logical fallacies:
|
| Hasty generalization: The title of the article, "California Spent
| $17 Billion on Homelessness. It's Not Working," makes a general
| conclusion about the effectiveness of the spending based solely
| on the fact that the problem of homelessness still persists.
|
| False cause: The article implies a false cause fallacy by
| suggesting that the fire at the Wood Street encampment was the
| primary cause that forced a decision to clear the camp,
| oversimplifying the issue by ignoring other factors. False
| dilemma: The article presents a false dilemma by portraying the
| situation as a binary choice between offering limited shelter
| beds or allowing individuals to continue living in unsafe
| circumstances, neglecting potential alternative solutions.
|
| Appeal to emotion: The article utilizes emotional language and
| personal stories to evoke sympathy and support for the
| individuals living in the Wood Street camp, appealing to the
| reader's emotions rather than presenting logical arguments.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| [flagged]
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| So where is that 5% on your bell curve in Rio De Janeiro? Or
| most of Europe? Or most parts of Asia?
|
| Why is the 5% of people in the world who according to you are
| uncivilized concentrated in the U.S.?
|
| Because homelessness of the sort that you see in the US simply
| doesn't exist in most countries in the world. Both countries
| that are as rich or significantly poorer than the US.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| Ready my OP again, thats my exact point!
|
| This is not caused by some unprecedented economic crash or
| poverty crises. As I've said in the OP, "this is an epidemic
| of uninformed tolerance and apathy ravaging an entire
| nation."
|
| These are either addicts, mentally ill or uncivilised people.
| Every society from the most liberal ones to the most
| tyrannical ones have set up laws and institutions to deal
| with them.
|
| You forcefully institutionalise the mentally ill. You provide
| an option of voluntary treatment to addict or forced. You
| forcefully remove the uncivilised people.
|
| I personally have stronger beliefs when it comes to what to
| do with these peoples but that will get me banned (its a
| little biblical).
|
| What I'm talking about here is the humane/liberal option. The
| alternative is to let them rot and devolve further whilst
| ravaging our cities, nobody wins.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > These are uncivilised people (by definition), a lot of it is
| mental illness and the rest is refusal be a civilised human.
|
| Spoken from a position of priviledge and perceived moral
| superiority. Where do you live, and how much do you earn? Have
| you ever considered what it would be like if you couldn't
| afford where you live, no matter how much you earn?
|
| Cost of living has gone up but wages haven't. Minimum wage
| hasn't been adjusted in years, while rent & housing multiplied
| thanks to unfettered capitalism. I was lucky in that I managed
| to buy a house in 2017, but since then the prices have gone up
| and I would no longer be able to afford the house I live in
| were it to go on the market, despite my wage having gone up 50%
| or thereabouts.
|
| It's a trite comment, but seriously, check your priviledge. A
| nontrivial percentage of the visitors of this website are
| homeless, couch surfing, live in a car, or pay more for a roof
| over their heads than they can actually afford.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| I grew up around poor people. I remember watching my cousin
| cry to my aunt for money to buy pens/pencils whilst my aunt
| knew she didn't have the money nor did her husband working 12
| hours on a pineapple plantation.
|
| I have another uncle who threw away 15 years of his life
| being a truck driver in the deserts of Saudi Arabia just so
| that his son and daughter could get a decent education.
| Meanwhile his wife (my aunt) raised two kids alone, whilst
| herding goats, chickens and managing a rubber planation.
|
| Don't talk to me about privilege. These people are scum. Low
| lifes. Not only do they have access to handouts (especially
| in europe), they have access to an infinite amount of jobs.
|
| How do you think tens of thousand of UNSKILLED people cross
| the border illegally with no money, work low skilled jobs and
| make enough money not only to sustain themselves but also to
| send money back.
|
| You have no idea how privileged and uninformed you are. All
| these stories I told is because of communism. We are from one
| of the most blessed regions in the world, rivaling california
| and florida in beauty but communism ruined my state. Now
| everybody above 90 IQ is forced to be flee the country.
|
| Everybody I know including myself are expats. Nobody wants to
| leave but they have no choice, there is no future here. So
| yeh I would have unfettered capitalism over your delusional
| childish theories of good vs bad.
|
| Side Note: price increased are due to inflation caused by the
| expansion of the money supply. Guess what expands the money
| supply? Also in central banking system, this expansion is
| done through the banking system creating massive bubbles and
| extreme money concentrations.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Of course it is not working, because people who decide where
| these money should be spent never really want to solve this
| problem.
| chrsw wrote:
| How many of these homeless people are actually from California?
| unity1001 wrote:
| And it wont work until California can stop what is called 'The
| Greyhound Express'. That's what some people in other states call
| the practice that some states have - offering their homeless a
| one way ticket to California or jail. They export their problem
| to California, and they criticize California for it.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| If there's any "Greyhound Express" it's going in the other
| direction: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
| interactive/2017/dec/...
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Just build more housing ffs.
| last_responder wrote:
| Building housing for someone who has addiction issues or other
| mental issues is not going to do much of anything.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| No, but having housing being affordable would stop a lot of
| people from going down darker paths from the start.
| rcpt wrote:
| Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred
| years ago:
|
| > THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social
| phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed
| statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason
| why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living,
| despite increase in productive power:
|
| > As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more
| -- constantly forcing down wages.
|
| > Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human
| labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate
| poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are
| intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced
| to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only
| increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those
| who own land. Wages do not increase -- wages cannot increase. The
| more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to
| make anything at all.
|
| http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm
|
| A Land Value Tax fixes our problems but in California we voted in
| Prop 13 which is about as far from that as you can get. And now
| here we are.
| geoelectric wrote:
| There's a difference between an LVT and a property tax. LVT is
| just on the footprint, the unimproved land, vs. a standard
| property tax (what Prop 13 more or less freezes) which includes
| the value of the buildings on it.
|
| George was pretty big on the idea that you only can only
| ethically tax natural assets taken away from the community--
| e.g., collect ongoing ground rent in exchange for the right to
| deed a chunk of land and prevent others from using it--and that
| those funds should then be redistributed to the community as
| compensation for their loss. He didn't think we should
| discourage success by taxing labor, trade, and improvements
| that don't come from nature.
|
| I agree Prop 13 has been horrible for a lot of reasons. But
| even without it we wouldn't have anything like a Georgist LVT--
| we'd just have a lot more rent-taking by the state on
| improvements, on top of all those other disincentives he didn't
| like, and likely still with no citizen's dividend/UBI to show
| for it. Home prices might not be quite so damned wacky, though,
| if we didn't put such a huge disincentive on turnover.
| Dig1t wrote:
| There is already an incentive to build densely and provide more
| housing, developers already want to do this because they make
| more money by doing so. They are literally not allowed to build
| anything other than single family homes though, the local
| homeowners actually control what is allowed to be built.
|
| That is to say: the people who have an incentive to keep
| housing supply low are the ones deciding what is allowed to be
| constructed in their town.
|
| If I go buy a piece of land in Cupertino and I want to build an
| apartment complex, I have to go apply for permits and get
| approval from the city of Cupertino zoning board. The people on
| that board are all people who live in Cupertino that own single
| family homes, they have a strong incentive to deny my
| application if I am building my apartment complex anywhere near
| their neighborhood. Basically every single city in California
| has zoning laws that prohibit you from building anything other
| than suburban single family homes in most of the town.
|
| You can fix the housing crisis by passing a law that limits the
| power of the zoning board to deny permits for these types of
| housing.
|
| Take a look at the Cupertino zoning map:
| https://map.gridics.com/us/ca/cupertino#11.93/37.31591/-122....
| if you click layers -> planning -> zoning you can see an
| overlay of the zoning for the whole city. The light beige color
| is "single family" zoned, meaning that nobody is allowed to
| build anything other than low-density homes. Notice how _most_
| of the city is designated "single family". This is the cause of
| the entire problem. Nobody is allowed to build anything more
| dense than the single family homes that are already there.
|
| Not-so-coincidentally, Cupertino is one of the most expensive
| places to live in the US. Look at Houston, TX. They have no
| zoning laws (it's not perfect they still have deed restrictions
| which sometimes act similarly to zoning laws), and it is a
| massive city. The median house price is ~340k, something that
| most normal people can afford. There is a clear correlation
| between reduced zoning restrictions and lower housing costs.
| carom wrote:
| It's really insane. Just remove everything that distorts the
| market. Restrictive zoning limits competition for a piece of
| land. Rent control distorts prices. Affordable units make
| building unprofitable. Get rid of that and housing will be so
| abundant.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The Houston method created massive urban sprawl and created
| mostly single family homes. Review boards that help shape a
| city provide a balance can go a longer way to a better city.
| The Cupertino example shows what happens when you don't need
| industry and everyone works elsewhere.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Didn't SB50 purport to fix this?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Houston has a _higher_ single-family detached-home ratio than
| the Bay Area [1]. It 's not that Houston's lack of zoning
| laws lets more people build the missing middle that is
| lacking in the Bay Area; it's that the geography of Texas
| allows growth-by-sprawl in a way that is lacking in the Bay
| Area, which has to grow by densification.
|
| When I visited Houston, the lack of sane urban planning was
| immediately evident. It is insanity to have a neighborhood of
| single-family detached housing literally across the street
| from 20-story towers adjacent to the transit line--that's
| exactly what Houston has.
|
| [1] See https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/visualization
| s/msama..., you have to hover MSAs and do the math yourself
| for precise ratios, but the difference between Houston and
| the San Jose MSAs is stark enough to not need to do the
| calculations.
| [deleted]
| biomcgary wrote:
| Another way of addressing the problem (in terms of the framing
| above) is to make land unnecessary to labor. Universal work
| from anywhere would substantially reduce the ability to extract
| rent because it would increase competition among a much larger
| group of landowners. Why do you think all the landowners are so
| eager for the peons to RTO?
| rcpt wrote:
| I'm a little bit skeptical that we could destroy our business
| clusters and remain equally competitive on the world stage.
|
| Seems a lot easier to tax land.
| jdasdf wrote:
| Land Value Tax simply does not work.
|
| It fixes nothing, and causes severe problems
| kinghajj wrote:
| Why not, and what problems would it cause?
| acchow wrote:
| Wages do increase, but then it's all spent on housing. And
| lately, also spent on healthcare.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The incredible cost increases for healthcare started in 1968
| with government interference in it. The more interference,
| the more it costs.
|
| The same effect happens with every industry the government
| massively interferes with. For example, education, and real
| estate.
|
| Look what happens in industries that experience very low
| levels of government interference, like software. Costs trend
| to zero.
| droptablemain wrote:
| I know a lot of this discussion focuses on the Bay Area, but I
| live in central LA and the situation is totally out of control
| here as well. Needles, human feces, trash everywhere, people
| sleeping in front of storefronts.
|
| Walking around parts of LA at night feels like you're in a neo-
| noir dystopian film. It's literally ghastly.
| option wrote:
| make sure you vote against incumbents in local and state
| elections. There are no other peaceful and humane ways out of
| this.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| mythrwy wrote:
| Homelessness, in the volume it exists, is largely a result of
| social/cultural decay in my estimation.
|
| It's the result of degradation of family and community and other
| important social structures.
|
| On one hand we have made housing something like a Ponzi scheme so
| that some may realize profit without effort. Nothing is free.
| When someone gets without producing someone else loses. Housing
| isn't the only example of this either. Much of our economic
| reality is one make-money-at-the expense-of-the-other-guy-while-
| giving-as-little-as-possible scheme after another.
|
| But also we have embraced "liberation ideology" largely starting
| in the 1960's. Yes, our former culture was oppressive, stiff and
| judgmental. Women stayed home and cooked. Get divorced, and
| everyone will give you the stink eye around town, so I hope he
| doesn't beat you too badly when drunk. Gays stayed in the closet.
| The mentally ill were forcibly confined and abused. "Bums" got
| beat up by the local sheriff and dropped outside the town limits
| instead of being given free needles and a pass to shoplift.
| Church ladies gossiped and judged and it was a very hard time
| being "different". Hope you belong to the right secret men's
| organization because that's how you get in with local banker and
| judge and get a start on the good job ladder.
|
| But also people helped one another. Encouraged one another (even
| if it was through judgement and social pressure and occasionally
| violence). There was a greater sense of community. People at that
| time were culturally closer to the era when they had to band to
| together to travel to and settle a new land and build towns.
|
| Now it's I have a credit card so I'll do what I want and move
| where I want and this place I live isn't a community and I don't
| talk to my neighbors anyway and one city is another really and
| everything is anonymous and transactional and no one goes to
| church anymore. Sexual freedom without regard to consequences
| (especially the resulting children and lack of long term
| relationships). Drug use is fine, it's a personal choice, and
| besides I'm dealing with so much inner pain and trauma and no
| pain should ever be. In fact the doctor may just give you
| something to numb you and shut you up altogether so you can keep
| being a good cog and not a squeaky wheel.
|
| So, we are seeing the results of all this. What we had before
| wasn't good, but this isn't either.
|
| I don't know what the answer is. I believe people should do what
| they want. I do what I want personally. Just observing and noting
| what I think the root cause might be.
|
| Maybe our real culture in America hasn't developed yet but I
| can't believe it's ultimately sterile communities where people
| don't look out for their neighbors and people shooting up drugs
| on streets with a few rich hiding behind gated communities and
| controlling law makers. But maybe it is, maybe that is what we
| are about as a society. I like to think not.
|
| Sorry for the rant, but this I believe is the root cause and
| until we solve it (somehow) the problem remains.
| tptacek wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/harm-reduc...
|
| (I don't have an opinion about the advocacy in this piece other
| than to say that I broadly agree with the diagnosis it has of the
| problem).
| scrum-treats wrote:
| We need universal basic income. We just introduced AI that will
| take millions of people's jobs. We must reframe how we view
| humans now. We're no longer work mules. AI can do it. So now, if
| we want humanity to remain a species on Earth, we have to take
| proactive measures to ensure humans can live. It's time.
| buzzert wrote:
| So, spend _more_ money then?
| scrum-treats wrote:
| You actually end up spending less money, actually.
|
| When basic physiological needs are covered (e.g., food,
| water, housing, clothing, healthcare)[1], turns out both
| petty and violent crime decreases. This means physical and
| psychological safety increases. As safety increases, ability
| to develop interpersonal relationships increases, self-esteem
| increases, and as a whole society thrives. People, less
| focused on survival only, are able to function in the world
| with stability.
|
| This is the same with supporting preventative medicine. When
| you advocate and support infrastructure for handling medical
| care in proactive ways (e.g., preventative care), turns out
| people's health concerns are mitigated much earlier. In many
| cases health issues don't manifest into cost-heavy medical
| solutions, requirement for pharmaceuticals decreases, and
| happiness, well-being, and morality rate increases.
|
| So yea. Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare are
| now considered crucial to human survival.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
| dontbeabill wrote:
| [dead]
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| If you spend [big scary number] on a thing and it "doesn't work",
| absent some real analysis that just as much means you under spent
| as that you may have over spent.
|
| It's like pointing at construction cranes in a rapidly growing
| city and saying, "look none of this new housing is working
| because rents keep going up!"
|
| California and so many other regions have real unaddressed
| homelessness issues that have long, long been utterly ignored.
| It's more likely that we're _insufficiently_ addressing the real
| scope of the issue.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Ironically, in my opinion, this comment here is the meta-level
| crux of it all. No matter how much money they throw at it, no
| matter how badly it fails, the proponents will always just
| double down and say that if only they spend more money next
| year, this time it would fix it. A year later when now there's
| even more homelessness, it's not because their policies failed,
| of course it's because they didn't tax you hard enough, and if
| only they had X amount of money this time they'd fix it. It's a
| never ending cycle.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| But on the other side, the same accusation, people will
| reflexively and cynically throw up their hands and say "see
| it's not working" and give up, offering no real better
| solutions themselves other than they don't want to spend
| money.
|
| If people point to clear, concrete, distinct problems that's
| one thing. But gesturing vaguely at "boy lots of money being
| spent here" that's another.
|
| Living near the heart of an ongoing unresolved homelessness
| crisis my entire life the driving force I've seen, despite
| all the money being spent is 1) largely an insufficient
| status quo approach and 2) no actual better ideas from those
| opposed.
|
| So in fact both sides are doing badly.
|
| Regarding point 1 in my jurisdiction, despite all the money
| being spent, all the ribbons being cut on performative new
| social housing projects, you can add up the numbers of units
| and find that over the decades there's actually constantly
| net loss of housing, as whatever occasionally new is created
| is dominated by the old affordable units being destroyed.
|
| Despite this clear and provable net loss in affordable
| housing and an ensuing obvious expected rise in homelessness,
| critics point out that we spent too much money on
| homelessness, offering no better solutions themselves but
| simply to spend less money. Of course if less money was
| spent, if less homes were created, the net loss of units
| would be even more extreme, and the amount of visible street
| homelessness would only increase further.
|
| These [scary big number] amounts of spending sound like waste
| but more likely that they're just barely enough to band aid
| the wounds and prevent utter disaster.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| "Our problems are worse than ever, better stay the course!"
| freddybobs wrote:
| There is an episode of the "you're wrong about" podcast, that
| discusses homelessness. In that episode there are several
| discussion about several projects in California around
| homelessness. Those projects provided housing. The studies based
| on those projects showed that _overall_ the cost was _less_ that
| not having some housing and services. The podcast goes into more
| details, but as I remember this was because
|
| * It removes much of the medical and police cost
|
| * If people who are struggling don't have a roof over their head,
| it makes it _incredibly_ hard for them to get a job. Having some
| stability meant that many could pick them selves up and get a job
| and so forth.
|
| The end of the episode points out even though the programs were a
| success by most metrics - including being cheaper overall to tax
| payers - they were shut down.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id13...
|
| Here's the one on homelessness
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/homelessness/id1380008...
|
| Theres a good one about the "wellfare queen" that is related and
| rather eye opening
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ronald-reagan-and-the-...
| Aunche wrote:
| Looking at the transcript, I barely see any mention of
| California, and when it's mentioned there is nothing about
| their policies.
|
| https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883985-homelessness
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > overall the cost was less that not having some housing and
| services
|
| This is always the justification for socialist-style programs.
| It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading.
| What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to
| incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find
| yourself with a _lot_ more homeless than you used to have. Your
| studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we 've
| seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites
| more homeless.
| jlawson wrote:
| Otherwise known as, "If you subsidize something you get more
| of it."
| supercheetah wrote:
| Can you cite any studies on that?
| hellojesus wrote:
| It's called moral hazard. It persists in any giveaway
| program.
| el_nahual wrote:
| I can tell you about the experience with "housing first"
| approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that
| make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here.
|
| There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in
| "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.
|
| In some of these, every single resident has been offered
| housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them _refused
| housing_.
|
| Why? Because the _one_ condition of getting housing was to join
| a drug counseling program.
|
| There is an entire line of thought that goes something like
| "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not
| housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling?
| That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"
|
| It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people
| that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move
| into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of
| them will die.
|
| They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment
| with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost
| savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance
| trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the
| street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example,
| of a couple living on the street in which one partner is
| physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.
|
| So a measure that at first glance seems stupid,
| counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is
| actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may
| seem like the opposite.
|
| This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that
| it's not actually as simple as one would think.
| hnarn wrote:
| The strategy is called "housing first" and has been proven to
| work in Finland:
| https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
|
| The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance
| further seems to trigger some people -- after all, most of us
| pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free?
|
| What people don't consider is that when "we", the people with
| houses, don't spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay
| sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when
| society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects
| start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare
| costs etc.
| x0x0 wrote:
| What people do consider is that it's extraordinarily unfair
| for many people who struggle with housing costs -- imagine
| what eg SF-area rents do to a cook or cleaner earning even
| $50k annually -- if we're going to provide that for free to
| junkies.
|
| Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard
| and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be
| politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
| felix_n wrote:
| Are _you_ saying that it's unfair, or are you speaking for
| the working class?
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't on
| drugs. I just can't wrap my head around why we should
| reward people with free housing for being drug addicts.
|
| I have lots of sympathy for the drug-free homeless
| community. I think the drug addicted should be put in
| treatment programs or charged for possession of these
| drugs so that they can be treated in prison. I'm angry
| that we allow people to smoke fentanyl out in the open in
| SF. It's bad for everyone including those who are
| addicted.
| kristofferR wrote:
| A lot of homeless people, perhaps the majority, use drugs
| as a consequence of not having a place to live.
|
| Think about it, it's obviously much easier to use
| escapist drugs when you live on the streets. Not only do
| you want to escape, you are also surrounded by drugs and
| other misery.
|
| You are thinking about it the opposite way. In reality,
| you can't get people to stop using drugs while keeping
| them on the streets.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I think there needs to be some kind of sobriety
| requirement. Maybe put them through rehab, and then give
| them housing after they leave rehab.
|
| I saw this tweet from the Y combinator ceo that says 25%
| of those in a permanent housing program in SF died. (I
| assume of overdose). Getting people housed shouldn't be
| the priority, the priority is getting them drug free. htt
| ps://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20
| boucher wrote:
| Do you know how effective rehab is for people who don't
| go voluntarily?
|
| The unfortunate reality of drug addiction is that even
| for people who want out it's very hard. For people who
| don't, it's quite a lot harder. If there was a magic pill
| that cured addiction I think we might make different
| policy choices, but given that there isn't I don't see
| how your plan can really work.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Read this article and I think you'll understand the issue
| better: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-
| francisco-sros...
|
| Just giving the homeless a moldy and bug infested tiny
| room without any additional help isn't going to help
| much. It's "housing first", not "housing only".
|
| I don't think you understand addiction and rehab,
| frankly. Getting people to stop using drugs is quite
| easy, just keep them away from it for a while. You can
| send anyone to prison or rehab, and they'll stop using
| drugs for a while.
|
| The hard part is getting people from restarting to use
| drugs once you let them free, and you can't even hope to
| do that successfully unless they are motivated
| themselves, which they won't be if they live on the
| street.
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| > I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't
| on drugs
|
| Sobriety is not a condition of housing. Many housed
| people drink and do drugs and don't get kicked out of
| their apartments for it. Why should we apply a harsher
| standard to our most vulnerable population?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The assumption is that drugs perpetuate the
| illness/uselessness of the homeless. If you have a home
| and can manage to afford it on your own, you get the
| privilege of drug consumption (within the law). If it is
| causing you to be unhoused or unhinged and the rest of
| the community is putting money into you having a place to
| sleep, it seems reasonable to impose some standards of
| behavior.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Why do the unhoused have to be housed in high cost SF? The
| nice thing about doing this as a country is that they can
| place people not in their highest cost cities.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Unless you force people to relocate, they likely won't
| relocate themselves.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Right now these problems are being left to counties to
| figure out, just like mental health
| jandrese wrote:
| It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why
| am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the
| street are getting free apartments?"
|
| I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage
| of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are
| the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is
| a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big
| contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is
| that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even
| close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in
| SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a
| fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up,
| neither of which are popular with the people who have
| political power.
| trailbits wrote:
| When wages go up, rents go up. For rents to go down you
| either have to have more housing or less people in a given
| area.
| nrclark wrote:
| Or rent control.
| icelancer wrote:
| Rent control externalities are well-documented; long-term
| serious problems occur due to them, not the least of
| which is _lower_ affordability.
|
| Short review of the research can be found here:
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-
| eviden...
| rank0 wrote:
| Why isn't moving out of the most expensive city in the
| world an option?
|
| I believe the biggest factor is mental illness. The
| addiction and homelessness are the symptoms/results.
| (Obviously not in every case)
|
| We're at record low unemployment. If you're able and
| willing to work you can 100% make enough money to pay rent
| somewhere...it just might not be in SF.
|
| Idk why people feel that everyone should be entitled to
| live in any specific location.
|
| Also, FWIW the US homelessness rate is below 0.2% among the
| lowest in the world.
| franciscop wrote:
| While I agree with housing first and you, I think at the
| same time your quote is mischaracterizing the opposite
| point of view, which I've seen from close. The more
| appropriate quote would be:
|
| "Why am I paying rent for myself AND for the druggie on the
| corner (through taxes) while I cannot afford to pay for my
| son's college/medicine/whatever?"
|
| Living in a country with virtually no drug use (besides
| heavily abuse of alcohol ofc) it feels that while drugs are
| not the main problem for many, they are for some, and
| definitely make other problems worse.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole
| "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts
| on the street are getting free apartments?"
|
| Easy fix: Give them a free apartment, too. Let them see
| what it's like. If they do better there than paying rent or
| mortgage, great. But I bet they won't last more than a day
| or two before turning that key back in. They think a free
| apartment is some great thing to have, as if their
| neighbors won't be all the people they didn't want to be
| around in the first place.
| zizee wrote:
| Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes
| of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are
| trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study
| author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Very difficult to tease out the definition of various
| terms in studies and they are mostly trying to play to
| their anticipated audience.
|
| This is evident, for example, if you look closely into
| the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in
| the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Years ago, I took a class on _Homelessness and Public
| Policy_. I 've spent time homeless and read a lot, etc.
|
| There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
|
| It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and
| cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture
| means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both
| practically and because people are reluctant to hire you.
|
| Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal
| health coverage could help.
|
| There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and
| mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you
| wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not
| enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't
| provide a robust social safety net.
| kodah wrote:
| > There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
|
| Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of
| wage growth compared to cost of living?
|
| Personally, I've started to think it's the latter,
| because it explains why upper middle class non-
| millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often
| rely on income rather than capital gains.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You can have both things going on.
| kodah wrote:
| Does one not solve the other though? If it does, that
| seems to make them mutually exclusive.
|
| My personal conspiracy theory, and I admit it's a
| conspiracy theory, is that corporate land owners are the
| ones centering popular conversation and data around
| affordable housing rather than wage growth. It opens
| doors for rental assistance, a multitude of rental-based
| density expansions, and other programs that put _more
| money_ in their pockets rather than expanding the money
| income-based people make and keep via ownership.
| icelancer wrote:
| Wage growth is exploding in some areas (ours primarily)
| and not others, which contributes massively to the Baumol
| effect.
|
| Land owners aren't really incentivized that much to talk
| about affordable housing. Housing developers would like
| to fix the problem by building market-rate housing - as
| supply goes up, demand begins to be satiated and prices
| can come down over time. All the while, developers make
| more money.
|
| But building dense and inexpensive housing is often
| blocked by leftist-type politicians for being unsuitable
| for living, and NIMBYs of all sorts of political spectrum
| block it on wholly different grounds.
|
| More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized
| housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help
| America.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm not a land owner. I'm someone with an incomplete BS
| with a concentration in Housing who also spent years
| homeless.
|
| In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sq.ft. Post
| 2000, it was over 2400 sq.ft. and held on average one
| less household member. We've also torn down a million
| single room occupancy units in recent decades.
| kodah wrote:
| Apologies, I wasn't implicating you. Landowner could've
| been better expressed as corporate landowners. They're
| the ones that own the most residential real estate in
| large cities, which are generally the only places having
| this problem.
|
| My house was built in the 1950s at around 1200sq ft. It's
| since expanded to over 2000, mainly from finishing a
| basement and expanding the top level. I'd be curious to
| see the data you base that on, because the people I
| bought it from passed this down generation to generation
| and had their entire family living in it. The house I
| grew up in has a similar story.
|
| Another anecdote is that about half of the 1950s homes on
| my block were bulldozed and replaced with single units
| that have largely gone vacant. My cities issue is that we
| have plenty of housing, but even the bottom line single
| units are too expensive compared to wages because
| permitting and building costs are through the
| metaphorical roof.
| rank0 wrote:
| There is observably an abundance of cheap shelter. It's
| just not where people want to live.
|
| Something like ~97% of people live on ~3% of the land.
| [deleted]
| hellojesus wrote:
| What I haven't understood is: why don't people move away if
| they're doing min wage jobs in a place where they are
| clearly incapable of delivering any quality of life?
|
| Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market _has_ to
| pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated
| market.
| kelnos wrote:
| Moving itself is expensive. If you're living paycheck to
| paycheck, you don't have the time or money to even travel
| to another location to look for better housing and a
| better job, let alone the time or money required to
| actually effect a move.
|
| Consider that for many people in this situation, missing
| a few days of work to look for a new place to live might
| mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the
| lost wages for missing those days of work could put them
| behind on their bills or make it difficult to buy food.
|
| And even if they are able to spend time to find a new
| place to live without putting their finances in jeopardy,
| remember that they also have to find a new job in the new
| location, and doing that without further financial
| hardship could be difficult.
|
| There are also other considerations: someone barely able
| to afford living in SF or NYC might not have a car, and
| walk or take transit to work and to do errands. Living in
| a lower-cost area might mean needing a car to do things
| like buy groceries or get to work. If you already can't
| save money, how are you going to afford a car _before_
| you move to the new area?
|
| Many of us here can afford to take weeks or months off to
| take a break between jobs. Sometimes it's hard to
| understand that many people can barely take sick days
| without risking financial ruin.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Not to mention that it might also involve moving away
| from what little support system that you do have, the
| cousin that provides child care while you work your
| second shift janitor job, for instance.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There was a recent study that, like everything else with the
| homelessness problem, Housing First is most successful in
| places where housing is not ridiculously expensive to find,
| so the costs of implementation are low and housing units to
| place people in actually exist.
|
| The exact same things that burden the private housing sector
| in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning,
| neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) _also_
| restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar
| goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the
| exact same laws.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Why are all the lofty examples from countries that are
| hostile to refugees/immigrants like Scandinavian countries.
|
| Would love to hear examples of great public
| welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6
| million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two
| opposing goals but curious to know if there are
| counterexamples.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In Finland, it is housing first with a live in social worker.
| Also, for many, they never get a job or anything like that
| (their mental illness or substance abuse problems are never
| cured), it's just that it is cheaper for the Finnish
| government to house these people than not.
| adeon wrote:
| Around year 2009-2010, I worked in public sector in Helsinki
| in the real estate department. I worked the phone handling
| tenants calling and needing repairs. A large portion of the
| tenants were people from the homeless program. At the time I
| did not know this program was unusual.
|
| My understanding of how it worked was that if you were
| functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain
| building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly,
| although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part,
| just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for
| newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate
| building to the social workers in the homeless building they
| can then give out to new tenants.
|
| I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki
| basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've
| seen here.
|
| I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the
| homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads
| that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be
| forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While
| I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the
| people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it
| was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a
| home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's
| inhumane to make demands.
|
| I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in
| California. Housing is super expensive, and I think
| California also has a _lot_ more homeless than Finland ever
| did.
|
| The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care.
| I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who
| could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was
| bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some
| other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings,
| windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at
| the homeless problem._
|
| My take on it (after living in SF for many years):
|
| 1. Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or
| drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of
| their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause).
| California is very much against involuntarily putting
| people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs.
| This largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago,
| where people were put into horrible conditions in mental
| institutions.
|
| 2. I think a housing-first program would absolutely work,
| but it's politically infeasible. Most people would
| seemingly prefer to have homeless people all over the
| streets and sidewalks when the alternative is to give them
| free housing, because it's "not fair" to the people who've
| worked to pay for their own housing.
|
| 3. The option of busing/flying homeless people out of a
| high-cost city like SF and into a lower-cost region where
| their needs can be met is also politically fraught. There
| are (voluntary) programs that help homeless people travel
| to a place where they have family who can help them, though
| I don't think it's used as a solution as often as it could
| be. But the idea of forcibly moving homeless people to a
| random place or places where they have no connection or
| support network is considered inhumane and a violation of
| rights.
|
| I think #2 would be more acceptable to people if #3 could
| be used more, since presumably people could be housed in a
| location where housing is much cheaper. As much as I'm not
| super comfortable with the idea of just forcibly moving
| people to a different location, I think it overall can be
| better for the people involved, if it's done well. But
| that's the trick: can we actually ensure that the people
| relocated elsewhere will have their needs met, and will end
| up in clean, well-maintained housing?
|
| Beyond that, I think we need to get over our aversion
| toward requiring people to go into (and stay in)
| psychiatric care or drug rehab. This shouldn't be a
| requirement for receiving housing; it should happen
| concurrently with being housed, though a live-in rehab
| program is probably appropriate for many people, at least
| to start. But I think refusing treatment should just not be
| an option.
|
| And as a public health issue, and just an issue of keeping
| our spaces a nice, clean, safe place for everyone to live,
| ultimately I think we _should_ make homelessness illegal,
| as long as we can provide a good alternative for every
| single person in that situation.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| > Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or
| drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of
| their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause).
| California is very much against involuntarily putting
| people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment
| programs. This largely due to backlash over abuses from
| decades ago, where people were put into horrible
| conditions in mental institutions.
|
| This. I am old enough to remember those bad old days. We
| have simply replaced one form of inhumanity with another.
| There are people who need our compassion and help. We
| should give it to them. We also need to protect against
| abuse of and/or by the system. Why is this so hard to
| accomplish?
| shepardrtc wrote:
| > why should they get it for free?
|
| They shouldn't get it for free. They should be required to be
| in recovery programs and have jobs. Create state or federal
| jobs for them if necessary.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Ok, call it handouts. But if you _just_ care about the
| budget, providing housing is the cheapest way to solve the
| problem. Will some people "take advantage" of this
| arrangement? Sure. Does it matter that much?
| redeeman wrote:
| yes, it does... otherwise feel free to send me about
| three fifty :)
| jeremyjh wrote:
| This is great if you don't want to engage with the actual
| issues or solve the problem.
| candiodari wrote:
| Fortunately San Francisco has had decades of social
| workers "dealing with the actual issues" and "solving the
| problem". To put it mildly, they didn't solve the issues.
|
| This is a lot better than social workers "helping" people
| on the street with "treatment".
| legitster wrote:
| _I_ want this person off of the streets for completely
| selfish reasons _to myself_.
|
| Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live
| _somewhere_. If it 's not a publicly funded home then it's
| going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes
| for.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It's not selfish to want the public to be able to enjoy
| public spaces.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think you're on the same page with the person you're
| responding to.
|
| @shepardrtc said people who get free housing should work
| for it, and @legitster is saying that it is in the
| taxpayer's self-interest to spend some taxes housing the
| unhoused. I took that to mean that a work requirement is
| secondary to getting them off the street in the first
| place.
|
| I agree that we should be providing drug recovery
| mechanisms and promoting a work ethic in people who are
| long-term houseless, but our options seem to be (leave
| them on the streets, parks and front lawns of our
| cities), (put them in prison), or (put them in publicly
| funded housing ala halfway houses).
|
| First one seems like none of us want it (unless you live
| in the suburbs and have fled the problem). Second one is
| too far, and even with good healthcare services,
| involuntary commitment should only happen for the
| severely ill. That leaves the third.
| adamrezich wrote:
| for some reason many people have stopped caring about the
| notion of societal trust and cohesion, and even the idea
| of valuing it as something to be desired and strived for.
| it's an odd kind of defeatist nihilism, and I've seen it
| spread year after year.
|
| these are the same people who will scoff when you suggest
| that stealing from Walmarts or Targets or whatever is
| wrong. they'll tell you, "dude, shrinkage is a thing,
| they build the cost of stolen or damaged goods into their
| budgets. and, anyway, why do you care so much about
| massive corporations' bottom lines, anyway?" obviously I
| don't, but I sure do care about living in a place where
| brazen broad-daylight theft is _rare_ , and not something
| you see every time you go to the store!
| drcode wrote:
| Without a recovery program, some people will still just
| spend their day smashing car windows to get money for
| drugs, then go home to their free apartment
|
| It might still be worth it regardless, but keep that in
| mind
| i_am_jl wrote:
| If that person is currently living on the street,
| spending their day smashing car windows to get drugs,
| it's absolutely still worth it.
| philwelch wrote:
| There is a way around this dilemma that solves everyone's
| problems. People who go around smashing windows etc. are
| arrested and thrown in jail. If they repeatedly offend,
| they receive longer and longer sentences, perhaps at some
| state penitentiary in a more cost effective location. If
| they are addicted to drugs, they are enrolled in
| mandatory treatment programs while in prison. This person
| is hence housed and separated from civil society, with
| much less incentive to cheat the system.
|
| This even solves the other problem that you haven't
| brought up: the person who sleeps on the street smashing
| windows all day is likely to wreck the free apartment you
| end up giving them, too.
| kodah wrote:
| We've done that for a long time and it doesn't change the
| outcome. You either pay exorbitant rates for them to sit
| in jail or you pay exhorbitant collective insurance
| rates. Worse off cities will usually incentivize those
| people to stay out of certain areas and _in_ other areas,
| which also causes equity issues.
|
| We're better off actually helping people. Getting to the
| root of what's wrong and what threshold we declare
| someone needs help and of what type is what we're trying
| to figure out.
| drcode wrote:
| I mean, there's more complexities here insofar as it
| seems the prisons need to be run a lot better than they
| currently seem to be run, and we need to get better about
| prosecuting petty crimes.
|
| Since we currently aren't doing those things, people are
| searching for alternate solutions, but there don't seem
| to be any that show much promise (though I'm sure people
| can cite a study that "proves" I'm wrong and can explain
| why the $17B spent by California doesn't count as
| counterevidence, even though a lot of that money was
| spent on "housing first" friendly policies)
| philwelch wrote:
| * * *
| bee_rider wrote:
| This hypothetical person will either smash windows and go
| to an apartment, or smash windows and go sleep somewhere
| in public. If they are already at the point of smashing
| windows, then there's some element of desperation or
| misanthropy that makes me prefer that they spend their
| night somewhere private.
|
| Anyway if we're designing hypothetical people, we can
| come up with sympathetic ones too, so it seems like a
| wash policy-wise.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| What jobs do you imagine these people will be compelled to
| do?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Most homeless people are just normal people who dont have
| a home. They can pick up garbage or dig ditches or plant
| trees at the very least. Plenty of menial labor that
| needs to be done.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| And if they don't want to do this menial labor?
| adamrezich wrote:
| why should any society cater to able-bodied people who
| physically live in it while refusing to contribute
| anything toward it?
|
| 100 years ago this question would've sounded ridiculous,
| yet here we are today.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Read a bit about Diogenes if you think this is a recent
| question. But I do wonder, what do you think members of
| society should be required to contribute to that society?
| adamrezich wrote:
| refraining from relieving oneself in the middle of a
| street or sidewalk would be a great first step.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Options include:
|
| 1. send them to extremely cheap housing in bumfuck
|
| 2. jail
|
| 3. let them be homeless if thats what they want
|
| Imo most of the people who think this way are addicts or
| mentally ill and should be involuntarily committed, so my
| preferred option is
|
| 4. Rebuild the asylums and commit people(with heavy
| oversight) who are completely incapable of caring for
| themselves. Although this option is similar to 2
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Sounds pretty illiberal to me. Lately (due to the whole
| pandemic/vaccine controversies), I've begun to wonder
| what drugs the state can force individuals to take or not
| take, and increasingly it seems that individual freedom
| is the rule in the US at least.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vondur wrote:
| There are some housing near my house that was simply
| repurposed motels. Seems to work, I don't notice any people
| just hanging around. Seems to work better than the standard
| homeless shelters we have here, that are pretty restrictive
| and they force the homeless to leave during the day and
| return at night.
| acchow wrote:
| On a national level, Housing First will help a lot.
|
| If California tried this, it would probably attract too many
| people to the state and run out of money.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| > Proven to work in Finland
|
| Finland, a tiny baltic nation that has almost nothing in
| common with the USA.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| The Bay Area is about the same population as Finland. And
| it has a higher gdp per capita than Finland.
|
| I agree that we are working with more "technical debt" than
| Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won't work. But
| strategically I don't see a major difference.
| fragmede wrote:
| The Bay Area doesn't control immigration and cannot set
| its own monetary policy. Some problems need to be solved
| at the Federal level, but the Bay Area does not set
| Federal policy.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| They don't get it for free in Finland - your link says it is
| important that they are tenants, have a contract, and pay
| rent(possibly with housing assistance).
|
| Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of
| factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc,
| and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of
| homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that
| housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will
| just enable the drug addiction types.
| aeternum wrote:
| The way 'housing first' has been implemented in SF is
| terrible. It is operated as a lottery helping a very tiny
| percentage of the homeless with a house/apt worth $1mil+.
| Those numbers will never solve the problem.
|
| If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually
| provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be
| a strong proponent.
|
| The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a
| tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades
| to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists
| that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences.
| Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these
| non-profits throughout the process.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-
| con...
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I think the biggest thing these programs fail to take into
| account is that a significant portion of San Francisco's
| homeless population is not from San Francisco. I've met kids
| on Haight Street who said they'd rather be homeless in SF
| than in an apartment in Cleveland. Are you going housing to
| all the homeless people who migrated to SF, and then keep
| housing all the new people who show up?
|
| The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore
| drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing
| that gets provided to them.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I like the idea, but I don't think a homeless person should
| be entitled to free housing in one of the most expensive real
| estate areas of the world. Why work full time at mcdonalds to
| pay rent when you could just be a drug addict with a free
| house? Maybe we could create free housing communities where
| real estate is a bit cheaper.
| dv_dt wrote:
| This idea of worrying about who gets what for free before
| actually solving the problem, is a major blocker in solving
| the homelessness problem. And not only do the homeless
| suffer for it, the people who have work or homes in the
| area suffer for the lack of pragmatism about it.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| If you offer free housing, there will be millions
| claiming they are homeless to take advantage. Just look
| at the PPP loans that were taken advantage of during the
| pandemic to get an idea how far people will go to get a
| bit of free cash.
| adriand wrote:
| Let's also recognize that if you are a home owner and
| especially if you also have a mortgage, you are already
| benefiting from massive government subsidies and
| "handouts". An enormously valuable one is the exemption
| for capital gains taxes on primary residences. Or the
| ability to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes
| from your taxable income. The list is long and represents
| huge sums of money.
|
| The amount of tax revenue forgone by the government for
| the capital gains exemption alone surely dwarfs the money
| it would take to provide affordable housing for many
| people. To salt the wound further, these benefits turn
| home ownership into a lucrative investment vehicle that
| drives up prices, worsening the crisis!
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I agree with you, I just feel like if I were working a
| minimum wage job busting my ass to pay rent to my
| landlord, I'd be deeply offended that you can be rewarded
| free housing essentially for being addicted to drugs.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Why would you imagine that free housing would be
| something to envy over regular rentals? Minimal housing,
| possibly surrounded by other at-risk people working
| through serious issues seems like not something to envy.
| zem wrote:
| you would be working the same minimum wage job and
| busting the same ass to pay the same rent to the same
| landlord, regardless of whether someone else got housed
| for free. this is indeed a very real problem, but the
| problem is that people are forced into long hours at
| (insufficient) minimum wage jobs in order to get
| unaffordably priced housing. you should be resenting the
| people higher up the chain who have created these
| conditions, not the people lower down who might be
| getting something for free.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think culturally we need to get our heads on straight.
| There's no reason for someone who is capable of work to
| be feeling offended that a sick person gets something
| they can earn. I'm not angry disabled people can get
| income just for being disabled: being disabled sucks ass!
| Similarly I wouldn't envy a homeless/addicted person:
| being homeless rots your brain and being addicted is like
| being enslaved. I'm a free man and I'm happy with that.
| Yes I must work for my housing but I guarantee my quality
| of life is better than someone whose addiction drive them
| out onto the streets.
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| p_j_w wrote:
| And yet, in spite of being offended by it, your life
| would actually be better for them getting free housing.
| boucher wrote:
| You seem really intent in your comments on this post to
| conflate drug addiction and homelessness, which are
| overlapping but definitely separate issues.
|
| Also, there are housing assistance programs for everyone
| who makes less than a certain amount of money, and I
| think everyone who advocates for more housing for the
| homeless would agree with more affordable housing in
| general. Mostly people who work in this space agree that
| housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This gets to one of the core issues. The homelessness
| issue, as well as mental health issues, are all left to
| counties in the US. This leads to bussing the homeless and
| it's not even clear if the cause for the homelessness is in
| the area the homelessness is felt. I might become homeless
| in New York and get on a bus to San Francisco because the
| weather is nicer and I hear they are nicer to homeless
| there. This would be much more effectively tackled at a
| state or better federal level. At least handling this on a
| state level is a hard requirement to do what you propose
| and create the housing where it's cheap, not where it's
| costly because it's nice or there are lots of jobs there
| for high-earners.
|
| All that said, the federal government in the US of course
| would also face all kind of pushback and obstacles in part
| due to the way it's set up.
| smadge wrote:
| There was a survey (San Fransisco Homeless Count and
| Survey, 2022) which says 71% of the homeless in San
| Fransisco were living in San Fransisco at the time they
| became homeless, 24% were in another California county,
| and only 4% were out of state. But generally it makes
| sense that if a single county adopted housing first at a
| large scale these numbers might change. Additionally, the
| primary cause of homelessness is the severe housing
| shortage and the high cost of housing. So homes for the
| homeless should not be implemented in only cheap areas,
| but the expensive areas with the highest homelessness
| rates. This should be combined with a large increase in
| general housing production in these areas to mitigate the
| cause of the homelessness in the first place.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Most of the homeless don't want to live somewhere cheap.
| They'd prefer to be homeless somewhere expensive. Unless
| you can force them to stay in the rural housing this plan
| won't work.
| cppenjoyer wrote:
| [dead]
| nancyhn wrote:
| Have you ever talked to the homeless people in SF? You could
| give them all a house for free and it wouldn't solve the
| problem.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| It's not a housing problem, it's a drug and mental health
| problem. Many of the unhoused people you see could stay in
| shelters but don't--often the areas near shelters have the
| most camps near them. They simply don't want to follow any
| rules and now conditions are so accommodating that being
| outside in good weather is better than staying in a shelter
| with a curfew.
| etchalon wrote:
| Shelters are not widely known for being safe and
| accommodating places.
|
| Most people would chose camping over them.
| delusional wrote:
| > What people don't consider is that when "we", the people
| with houses, don't spend our dollars housing homeless people,
| we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or
| not when society around us partly disintegrates and
| additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse,
| violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
|
| There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so
| much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I
| couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed
| enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice.
| What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I
| want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I think it's harder for people to see it that way when
| there's means testing. Also when you're at the just-better-
| than free tier, but paying full price.
|
| I think that's the nice thing about UBI. It's a little
| different to rail against u employed people getting $1,000
| a month when you're also getting $1,000 a month.
| mjevans wrote:
| UBI won't answer the problem of RENT. The rent will
| always rise to pickup the new headroom until there is no
| longer headroom. All the profit will go to the rent
| seekers who leave nothing for anyone to get ahead.
| [deleted]
| ntonozzi wrote:
| The episode focuses on Utah's housing first program, not
| California. They also bring up that it wasn't a panacea and in
| practice it took more time than expected before the cost to the
| public went down.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Thank you for these recommendations. Can't wait to listen to
| both episodes.
| godelski wrote:
| This reads as a political ad, not a news story.
|
| The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled
| up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How
| did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How
| does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the
| population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal
| problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor,
| there's people Newsom appointed. Don't just get me riled up, tell
| me what's actually going on so that I can inform myself of how to
| fix this. Don't just say this is a problem and point a singular
| finger talking about large sums of money, break it down. Tell me
| why homeless decreased in SF and Orange but increased in LA, San
| Jose, Oakland, and San Diego[0]. Tell me why it skyrocketed since
| 2016, starting with Brown and then accelerated under Newsom[1].
| Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues that NY and CA
| aren't.
|
| Do some investigation. Distill expert information to me. Be a
| news article, not a political ad.
|
| [0] https://www.ppic.org/blog/homeless-populations-are-rising-
| ar...
|
| [1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-
| brief/homeles...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem?
|
| No, quite the contrary: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
| interactive/2017/dec/...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| A really good and fair story about the problems, including
| problems with government, law enforcement, neighbors and the
| unhoused themselves is "City of Tents"
|
| https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1156698343/city-of-tents-vetera...
| screye wrote:
| It is multi causal.
|
| Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist
| DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of
| drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on
| west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]
|
| But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl
| in the populace. [1][2]
|
| So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require
| residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to
| irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie.
| chronic) homelessness.
|
| [1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-
| crisis/#:~:text=To%20get%20mo...
|
| [2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
|
| [3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-
| fransi...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Why the homeless move to CA
|
| Good climate
|
| Cities provide cash payments to them
|
| Legal marijuana
|
| Open air drug markets
|
| Soft on crime prosecutors
|
| Liberal population that wants to provide for them
|
| Note: I make no judgement value on any of these items, just
| proposing reasons
| arcticbull wrote:
| - Good climate: Absolutely. It's much tougher being homeless
| in the winter in Chicago than it is in California.
|
| - Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the
| homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are
| they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm
| going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung
| out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal
| recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita
| homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory
| off your list.
|
| - Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here,
| but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids
| are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look
| at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real
| crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X
| the deaths per capita. [3]
|
| - Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.
|
| - Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?
|
| Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the
| US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's
| nice. I think that might be the entire story.
|
| [1] https://disa.com/maps/marijuana-legality-by-state
|
| [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-many-homeless-
| americ...
|
| [3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_
| mor...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Legal weed as you are not going to get arrested for
| possession friend, not where they buy it.
| ryder9 wrote:
| [dead]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Easier said than done.
|
| Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll
| most likely find what you're looking for...
|
| Anything political like this is going to have competing
| "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and
| essentially just arms of political parties.
|
| Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever
| conclusion they want.
|
| This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to
| want to be "data-driven".
|
| Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and
| simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the
| current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.
|
| Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't
| be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution
| that both parties will agree on.
|
| I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000
| homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
|
| That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem
| got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every
| other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much
| less on the problem.
|
| Draw your own conclusions...
| bombcar wrote:
| You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps
| not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do
| the digging and track _why_ they 're homeless, what they
| _have_ done (and what has been done to them), look at program
| projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to
| Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless
| a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have
| gone up, some aren 't, but there's tons of data (and
| governments are probably already tracking major portions of
| it).
|
| Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't
| help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because
| everything is political.
|
| 17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough
| numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every
| homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and
| something's not working.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-
| homeless-...
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling
| reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is
| reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where
| do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places--
| what is their sampling methods, etc?
|
| I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one
| has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of
| the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples'
| public records are for their own municipal budgeting.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you
| can't fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected
| politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The reporter did exactly what their job is and it is not to
| figure out reality from competing sources of truth.
| [deleted]
| josho wrote:
| The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts
| and distorting them into untruths.
|
| We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.
|
| I've read papers put out by research groups that were easy to
| debunk. Most people won't go to that effort and will take the
| glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being
| truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is
| a lie.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| My family and I were having a chaotic political argument
| about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away
| when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk
| about a specific event or general ideas about what should
| happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If
| we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the
| actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in
| general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000
| miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and
| let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things
| should be in the abstract.
|
| Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on
| feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about
| (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether
| military defense or caring for the poor is more important
| from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small
| conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do
| you and I _believe_? Can we find common ground? After we
| find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk
| about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.
| pauldenton wrote:
| I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have
| sources of information and narratives as to what is helping
| this country and what is harming it. Alternative facts are
| like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and
| life goals
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense
| that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's
| important, and I think you get this already, is that the
| symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of
| ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the
| idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding
| ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort
| of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism
| towards meta-modernism.
| mbfg wrote:
| "alternate religions" implies there are real religions.
| How does that work?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I was at Wood St in Oakland, CA.
|
| I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was
| washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed
| was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on,
| and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost
| all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL
| the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime
| as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want
| facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times
| gives a shit about the facts.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are
| 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
|
| Wrong.
|
| The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on
| the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense)
| divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set
| the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were
| homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the
| period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.
| erehweb wrote:
| It sounds like you're asking for a whole book. That's valuable,
| but not every newspaper story can be that in-depth.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the
| houses? 17B sounds like a lot.
| matthew9219 wrote:
| They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug
| addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then
| even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you
| find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of
| money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a
| few people who are down on their luck.
| russdill wrote:
| Everyone wants that solution. No one wants that solution in
| their neighborhood. Even unsubsidized low cost housing.
| s1k3s wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]
|
| I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
|
| Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free
| housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
|
| You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there
| are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land
| and just build the homes (and services needed by the people
| who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who
| needed shelter to come live there for free.
|
| But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates"
| will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the
| project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the
| solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
|
| They want homes built in _specific places_ , and those
| specific places happen to be highly desirable and very
| expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending
| anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I
| remember correctly, that was only a partial amount
| because they couldn't get all of the financial
| information. I think we all need to ask how much of this
| money actually reaches the intended population and how
| much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a
| problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash
| spigot is always running.
| russdill wrote:
| Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough
| housing. It's certain specific areas do not have
| sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land
| prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the
| area still need to be filled and those people still need
| somewhere to live.
| mbfg wrote:
| can you point to an example where they built homes and
| the infrastructure to support those homes where people
| blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my
| neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of
| what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
| majormajor wrote:
| It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a
| lot of costs in order to build.
|
| Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential
| properties _and_ homelessness, let 's say the government
| decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to
| live in them:
|
| Where do you put them?
|
| For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million
| bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build
| like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and
| call it a million (some property is already controlled by
| cities and such, after all).
|
| So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000
| buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.
|
| But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can
| build denser. _Too_ dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-
| ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though,
| look at the history of housing projects. Let 's do a 20
| person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750
| buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means
| we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750
| buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per
| project... that's gonna be tough without getting more
| contractors into the market and driving down the costs of
| construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a
| bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive _up_ the
| cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.
|
| And the more you try to push the density the more opposition
| you run into from both people who live and work nearby the
| sites _and_ advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a
| problem IMO but it 's not like getting rid of it would make
| the former go away immediately.
|
| And you still need a large agency of operations around trying
| to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them
| _out_ of the units before other people need them, etc.
|
| Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered
| and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts
| of the country? Sure, you _could_ just try to bus people to
| cheaper areas without this, but that 's gonna result in some
| deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people
| to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the
| cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness
| would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to.
| There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because
| they don't have the scale of demand for land or the
| hospitable climate.
| labcomputer wrote:
| I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build
| enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if
| we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city
| in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap
| land to build mid-density housing and all the services the
| population would need (hospitals, substance abuse
| assistance, public safety, etc).
|
| It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this
| in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced
| imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to
| get off the street" but also shipping people to this new
| mega-complex.
|
| It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick
| the substances, get over some of the trauma from your
| time on the street, and want to get back into the world.
| Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"?
| Is there no way to try to do something beyond that
| without having to travel a couple hundred miles _and lose
| the support network and any social connections you 'd
| made_?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I understand such people may be particularly fragile. But
| the rest of us move for a job all the time.
| searealist wrote:
| San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during
| the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main
| problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by
| mental health.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think this is a misleading description of the situation.
|
| Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the
| way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-
| judicial solitary confinement.
|
| > many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the
| Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in
| isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel
| unless they had a medical appointment or were being
| transported by a provider. They could not go for walks,
| exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health
| officials told the public to do for their mental health.
|
| > "People started entering the motels in April and they
| were quarantined all the way through October," Garrow
| continued. "People were having mental health breakdowns.
| People told me they were having suicidal thoughts."
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2020/dec/31/california-h...
| searealist wrote:
| I think you snipping away important context from your
| quote is a misleading description.
|
| > According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the
| ...
|
| So basically just grasping at straws for why the program
| failed.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The majority of people on the internet want housing to be
| affordable.
|
| The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to
| city council meetings want housing to be an investment that
| grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a
| direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
|
| (Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping
| down. Regions which aren't submitting _realistic_ plans to
| meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning
| privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like
| trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes
| to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
| thebigwinning wrote:
| Everyone wants cheaper stuff. The question is how to
| allocate limited resources.
| majormajor wrote:
| > The majority of people who vote in elections and show up
| to city council meetings want housing to be an investment
| that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses
| is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group
| wins.
|
| It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive
| land is in areas with _higher_ population density. You want
| cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of
| it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would
| increase people 's property values a bunch - look at the
| land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years.
| Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna
| make their property worth _less_.
|
| So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is
| _change_. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in
| noise, etc.
|
| That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely
| financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it
| isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny
| houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want
| is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change
| in noise, etc.
|
| These are also great fig leaf talking points when your
| real reason to oppose new development is financial, but
| you don't want to _sound_ greedy.
| majormajor wrote:
| > These are also great fig leaf talking points when your
| real reason to oppose new development is financial, but
| you don't want to sound greedy.
|
| You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property
| values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain
| people] to have the chance to move near me."
|
| And that one agrees with the numbers of how property
| values go _up_ with city growth and development, not
| down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or
| higher if LA had taken Detroit 's path?
| sovnade wrote:
| Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home.
| There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance
| abuse/addiction.
|
| Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the
| underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the
| first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts -
| mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal
| finance, etc.
|
| If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The
| uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted
| to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating
| in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you
| can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly
| challenging even for people with means and support systems.
| Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
| tornato7 wrote:
| I think the fallacy you're making is assuming all homeless
| have the same problems. There are definitely some homeless
| or near-homeless people where having a safe place to sleep,
| shower, and store their belongings will allow them to hold
| a job long enough to get back on their feet. There are
| others that need serious rehab. There are others that need
| mental health counseling. There are others that will never
| be able to care for themselves and need to be put in a care
| home.
|
| So really there is no one-size-fits all solution.
| Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention
| always has the best outcomes.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| I think if you give someone a house they are definitionally
| no longer homeless, even if they remain mentally ill or
| addicted to drugs.
| zehaeva wrote:
| Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the
| case. By using a housing first approach they've been able
| to severely decrease the number of homeless people.
|
| You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are
| needed as well.
|
| [0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-
| still-le...
| 221qqwe wrote:
| You can't really be homeless in Finland during winter for
| very long though.
| bsder wrote:
| Finland already has universal healthcare, no? Don't
| remove that from your calculations.
| cjpearson wrote:
| There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver
| of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness
| and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness
| can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are
| lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis,
| but where homelessness is less of a problem.
|
| The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's
| not the entire solution either) Building large quantities
| of housing is a difficult problem, especially in
| California.
|
| [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/ho
| meles...
| bsder wrote:
| 15% of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury.
| That statistic means almost 1 in 5 _right off the top_
| need long term medical care. "Mere housing" won't do
| jack for those people.
|
| Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical
| health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly
| healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those
| homeless are generally _hiding_ from someone and won 't
| want to be part of a tracked program.
|
| We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that
| needs lots of money.
|
| We know what happened in the past: those facilities were
| horror shows because of underfunding.
|
| We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the
| facility down and throw those people out onto the streets
| and let the prision system deal with them.
|
| The starting point for solving homelessness is universal
| healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare,
| everything else to "solve" homelessness is just
| rearranging the deck chairs.
| russdill wrote:
| California has a housing crisis and there is no political will
| to fix it. Not wanting low cost housing in your neighborhood is
| something that unites people very strongly across the political
| spectrum.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage
| hackernewds wrote:
| The implication that there is a Boogeyman political system
| that doesn't want to house the homeless in their neighborhood
| is suspect and laughter inducing. Politicians need the will
| of the people to persist.
|
| It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that
| consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in
| their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings.
| Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.
| mbfg wrote:
| i'm pretty sure that's what the op was saying.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the
| population? Are people being bussed in,
|
| Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless
| problem to other states and also do so figuratively by
| criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.
|
| If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better
| services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to
| your state, all other things being equal.
|
| This isn't, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply
| issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that
| California has some very successful industries that reward a
| narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these
| are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both _not_ adequately
| increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity
| better for the general good.)
|
| [0] Not _simple_ policy problems to resolve, the housing one
| for political reasons, the improving distribution without
| killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the
| distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.
| josho wrote:
| You've correctly identified the issues with media today. Rage
| inducing articles are easier to read and get more views. As
| soon as you introduce facts then very quickly it becomes a
| nuanced debate on the issue which is far less interesting
| because and worth less revenue.
|
| We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize
| companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well
| researched material.
|
| I don't know what those regulations would look like. But
| without them we are drowning in material that does society more
| harm than good.
| godelski wrote:
| Or, hear me out, make similar comments as mine and use your
| economic leverage. We've been trying to push for regulations
| and stuff for decades, it hasn't been working. I'm not saying
| stop, I'm saying that the strategy needs to be rethought.
|
| Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't
| matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or
| whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage
| with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce
| the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and
| not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions
| always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or
| helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can
| have politics about things that you know about, anything less
| is tribalism.
|
| You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight
| nor are you going to be able to march into the president's
| office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect
| just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This
| is the power you have at the individual level. You are part
| of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince
| you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or
| less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so
| fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit
| them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the
| traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't
| happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on
| politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect
| our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is
| all connected.
|
| Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call
| out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force
| themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them
| to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy.
| Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or
| they censor. Both are effective.
| indigochill wrote:
| Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial
| celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the
| school for the celebration, they had a panel where people
| could ask them questions. I asked them, given that
| journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why
| does the business model instead align on advertising?
|
| The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't
| pay for journalism.
|
| Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:
|
| 1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment
| isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.
|
| 2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for
| (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument),
| maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were
| willing to pay what it would cost to produce.
|
| And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds
| of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For
| example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling
| open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a
| kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is
| willing to pay for.
|
| Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently.
| One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS
| in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build
| an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way
| she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was
| worthwhile reporting.
|
| So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize
| "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples
| of, but in different ways. One is basically industry
| reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a
| financial feasibility perspective.
|
| The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know,
| but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants
| (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic
| countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In
| either case, it will probably look substantially different
| from how we think of journalism today.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real
| journalism, because that money pays for time, moving
| reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep
| investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to _copy_ that
| journalism, once produced. It 's text. Maybe some pictures.
|
| As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with
| people reading journalism made by one group but copied to
| several other places. The race to the bottom begins.
| There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the
| Kardashians. Gossip is _cheap_.
|
| We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless
| flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for
| itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.
|
| Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist
| may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb
| and how they _fed_ Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he 's dead
| and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot
| water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > Were there leaky buckets
|
| Oh, yes. Some samples:
|
| 1. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/city-audit-
| finds-...
|
| 2. https://thefrisc.com/sf-has-fought-homelessness-with-no-
| bid-...
|
| 3. https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-homeless-nonprofit-
| housin...
|
| This is common knowledge for folks in the Bay Area.
| tlogan wrote:
| Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given
| that California is essentially governed by a single party, it
| is subject to corruption and inefficiency.
|
| Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made
| stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per
| square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing
| this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's
| clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is
| not homeless.
|
| [1] https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/a-builder-
| convert...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| How much of the cost was just the process of getting all the
| permits? Looking at this crazy toilet in SF that cost $1.25m
| after the toilet itself was donated: https://abc7news.com/sf-
| bathrooms-noe-valley-public-toilet-1...
| luma wrote:
| This parses as "I don't know what's wrong but I know it's the
| Democrats" which isn't exactly insightful nor helpful.
| tlogan wrote:
| I do not think it is Democrat. It think it is because it is
| one party state.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Exactly. As much as Republicans and Democrats may not
| want to admit it, we need each other for accountability.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| We need viable political choices with incentives to
| compete on something other than alienating voters who
| would be expected to vote for the other side for
| accountability (which mostly means we need proportional
| representation.)
|
| That is not the same as needing the opposing party in
| America's duopolistic system.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Well, responsibility is what you get when you're in charge.
| It's axiomatically correct even if it isn't necessarily
| helpful (in the sense that there's no guarantee that a
| counterfactual republican California would have done any
| better).
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Given that California is essentially governed by a single
| party
|
| Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the
| Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one
| another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.
|
| > All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I
| don't know who, how, or why.
|
| Who: landowners.
|
| How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the
| burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and
| then using rent to capture money that should be going to said
| working class via wages and welfare.
|
| Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and
| have the political influence to make it happen.
|
| Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land
| value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast
| majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much
| overnight.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at
| this point, and it's regressive. Throw in some 0% base rate
| progressive income taxes, pigouvian taxes, maybe a small
| vat and you're on the right track.
| Ireallyapart wrote:
| [dead]
| kmonsen wrote:
| This is my fear for the country as well as the republicans
| are (in my opinion you can disagree) at the very least
| partially going crazy. We desperately need at least two
| parties working for a good government. California needs more
| checks and balances, and so does the country.
| tlogan wrote:
| I 100% agree. If you want to run for office here is San
| Francisco you need to be democrat. Which means that you
| need to be very nice to people which you know they are not
| good.
|
| On the other hand one really cannot be republican because
| of things like this:
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/anti-trans-
| repub...
| stuaxo wrote:
| Guilty of not reading the article yet - even the headline reads
| like a political ad.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues ...
|
| Wait, what?
|
| Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an
| a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with
| government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for
| the first time.
|
| ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years.
| Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped
| homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and
| savings).
| Justin_K wrote:
| I think you are equating the fact that most elected officials
| in CA are Democratic to this being a political hit piece. With
| that logic, is anything negative about our largely Democrat
| body of officials off limits?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Texas and Oklahoma openly bus their homeless to L.A. Rick Perry
| (former governor of Texas) openly bragged about it during his
| presidential campaign.
|
| An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood
| found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than
| 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal
| locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half
| of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority
| coming from Texas.
|
| Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of
| the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming
| homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in
| part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that
| has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that
| individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was
| homeless upon arrival.)
| boucher wrote:
| L.A.H.S.A.'s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the
| 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness
| had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a
| fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before
| becoming homeless.
| ripberge wrote:
| I'm not sure that LAHSAs homeless count is a good source of
| data. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-24/d
| oubts-r...
| boucher wrote:
| I don't know how relevant this story is to the question
| of whether people who are homeless in California are from
| California.
|
| In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data
| showed something which I found no evidence of, and in
| fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots
| of other data also suggest that a large majority of
| homeless do not come from other places.
|
| If someone wants to share other data about this issue I'm
| happy to read it.
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the
| population?_
|
| It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation's homeless. It has
| 50 percent of the _unsheltered_ homeless -- i.e. people camped
| outside.
|
| It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of
| the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a
| hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and
| Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not
| familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest
| of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive
| winters to be.
|
| 1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e
| 7b...
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run
| North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch
| most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.
|
| West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic
| peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous
| areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain.
| Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.
|
| East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of
| power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.
|
| In the mountains, large national forests which allow
| dispersed camping.
|
| It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's
| usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much
| worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt
| the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years
| ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the
| summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to
| include them.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has
| mild weather all year, better than many parts of
| California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot
| enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary
| to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful
| precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit
| in a rain shadow.
|
| If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities
| in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so
| in terms of amenable weather.
| irrational wrote:
| Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps
| drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot
| and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain.
| Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the
| rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up
| in the fall.
| xhevahir wrote:
| West of the Cascades, it's mild. To the east of them the
| climate is decidedly less mild, though, so I'd be
| interested to see how the numbers would compare between the
| two regions.
| briffle wrote:
| West coast winters are very mild, and there is very little
| humidity. We had a few days that got below freezing last
| year, most days were over 40.
|
| If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or
| heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold),
| Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland
| (super mild year round, low humidity)
| loeg wrote:
| The coast is relatively mild compared to inline Oregon or
| Washington, but winters are still wet and cold (especially
| in Washington).
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm not first-hand familiar with Oregon, but some parts of
| Washington have moderate temps. Coastal Washington gets a
| lot of rain but rarely freezes and -- anecdotally -- at
| least one city in Coastal Washington has vastly worse rates
| of homelessness on a per capita basis than some of the
| cities infamous for it, like Seattle and SF. And, yes, they
| are mostly camped outside, not in shelters.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Which city? I was in Spokane recently (obviously not the
| coastal city you are speaking about) and was surprised by
| how full of homeless people downtown was.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Olympia?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Add to that California's very high cost of living and
| tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to
| fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled
| with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership,
| skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages
| for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.
|
| I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless
| population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent
| on solidifying a peasant class.
|
| Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning
| pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly
| impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't
| already own, but even keeping a house within a family might
| soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being
| to rent from a giant housing corporation.
|
| And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here,
| it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to
| buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several
| years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford
| to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during
| the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least)
| almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10
| years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be
| obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per
| year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years
| longer, I would have been priced out.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't personally mind the idea of not being able to buy a
| house. That's not a thing I'm interested in anyway.
|
| But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's
| nightmare fuel right there.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary
| citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen
| (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| There are a lot of individuals who buy investment
| properties. I have friends who use this as their primary
| retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties.
| They are just successful small-business owners and the
| properties are their private property, unrelated to the
| business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most
| rental units were still owned by small landlords.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There are things besides individual citizens and
| corporations that could, in theory, own and rent housing.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, absolutely true. I wasn't really saying that not
| being able to buy a house is a good thing, but I did
| speak before thinking here.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Similar to what I've seen in HI. I imagine there would be
| more in HI if it didn't cost an expensive plane ticket.
| hackernewds wrote:
| There are. And they're vastly undercounted. Au contraire,
| the HI govt often deports the homeless off the island
| thebigwinning wrote:
| SF and further north are hardly nice weather locations.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Definitely, the winter I visited Mountain View it was 2C
| (35F) and ground frost.
| recursive wrote:
| I think above freezing in winter might generally be
| considered nice weather.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Define nice weather. If we are talking winters with
| temperatures consistently over 0C (32F), little to no
| snow, seattle and portland are great for winter.
|
| Nice weather for homeless people basically means not
| strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest
| and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| SF isn't a tropical paradise, but temperature extremes
| that cause death aren't very common.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| But relative to a lot of the US-- Chicago, New York.. it
| is very survivable.
| Jackpillar wrote:
| I mean what did you expect from an article from the Murdoch
| owned rag of WSJ that is essentially Fox News with a little
| sheen on it.
| jahsome wrote:
| Inadequate reporting is not a partisan or ideological issue.
| tptacek wrote:
| California's homelessness problem is not caused by other states
| offloading their homeless to California.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| That's a useful answer to one of the questions the article
| did not answer. Now, do you have a reliable source?
| quest88 wrote:
| Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.
|
| CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes
| it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is
| something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only
| homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low
| hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing
| (reforming zoning for example)
|
| There are also people who are homeless because of some
| other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other
| such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure
| what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals,
| but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic
| about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.
|
| There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones,
| and you cannot treat them the same.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to
| complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders
| between states (while having no borders between countries)?
|
| Edit: I dug up some data:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-
| population.ht...
|
| > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you
| pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
|
| > "This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem," said
| Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles
| Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the
| largest homeless census count in the country.
|
| > L.A.H.S.A.'s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of
| the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing
| homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
|
| CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in
| the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider
| you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years.
| Really shows the bias.
| ncallaway wrote:
| If it is caused by other states, that would indicate the
| problem is not uniquely California related, making the
| likely necessary solutions to be federal.
|
| If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate
| that the problem is something happening in California,
| and maybe a state level solution is best.
|
| You have to start the solution in the right place to have
| any hope of addressing the root cause.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Good luck getting the federal government to do anything
| to help a coastal state that isn't already covered by the
| executive branch.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I don't think the frame of "does this help or hurt a
| particular state" is a useful frame for the problem.
|
| We should look at it as "does this help or hurt _people_
| "
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Two words: Federal Support.
|
| If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or
| indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of
| people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder
| it. And the federal government is just that, the
| collective power of all states combined.
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| Exactly. The logistics may not be simple (i.e. actually
| getting the federal government's support) but the logic
| should be obvious: piecemeal support results in the ones
| that are doing the most to help get "penalized" with more
| people seeking help.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >What is the solution to that?
|
| So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by
| other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US
| you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you
| might be able to stop particular organizations like city
| governments from doing so. But in a general sense there
| is freedom of movement.
|
| The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving
| homelessness the more people will get sent there, and
| even more homeless will want to come there even if they
| are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see
| California spending billions on the problem... Texas
| would have no motivation of spending billions to solve
| the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid
| of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more
| beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This
| would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of
| California.
|
| California would see is homeless costs increase
| dramatically and would be incentivized to stop
| (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch
| wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.
| beerpls wrote:
| It's a warm climate with large cities which provide
| sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless
| over other avenues of living
|
| Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali
| over Canada for the winter. California also provides
| massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open
| arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless
|
| These aren't exhaustive reasons why, but it's a core part
| of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to
| address complicated social problems head on and instead
| virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester
|
| I'm not going to provide you with sources. It's too
| politicized of a subject. If you don't want to accept it
| for being this way i've learned not to argue. But at the
| very least if people really can't see why this problem
| exists as it does, here an entry
| peter422 wrote:
| Your argument is that an immigrant would rather be
| homeless in the US than housed in their home country?
|
| Almost no data backs that up.
| beerpls wrote:
| lol people would rather be poor in the US than mexico
| yes.
|
| your dichotomy is a false representation. and a poor one
| at that
| thebigwinning wrote:
| Why do they live in SF and further north if it's for
| weather?
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| You think people choose to be fucked up? And what's the
| solution here, shoot the homeless?
|
| Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new
| crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society,
| poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).
| beerpls wrote:
| people who take this emotional and illogical approach is
| exactly why the homeless suffer to the extent they do
|
| stop virtue signaling and start thinking or kindly avoid
| this topic because you're only causing harm
| tropdrop wrote:
| As others have pointed out, the problem has many sources.
| Other states/cities busing their homeless to California has
| historically been at least a minor contributor. California
| won a suit against the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, for
| specifically the practice of closing a psychiatric hospital,
| placing its freshly unhoused patients on Greyhound buses to
| Sacramento or San Francisco with one-way tickets, and giving
| the patients instructions to "call 911" when they arrive.
| [1]. 24 persons were documented and cared for by San
| Francisco specifically, but allegedly Nevada's largest mental
| health hospital did this with approximately 500 people.
|
| 1 - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-
| tent...
| [deleted]
| milesvp wrote:
| I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is
| spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal,
| it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend
| money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will
| come from other states. For any two states there is going to
| be migration of homeless between the 2, and the
| attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the
| amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very
| much be net importing homeless from many of the other states
| that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading
| their homelessness problem).
|
| I actually think this a fundamental problem with
| homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may
| actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when
| in reality they are helping to improve things globally.
| Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each
| player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there
| is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I
| had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of
| thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly
| becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there
| either.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile
| house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone
| else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be
| crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather
| is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy,
| shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of
| dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc
| etc).
|
| >>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may
| actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when
| in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
|
| I think the people who think they are positively effecting
| change are usually actually making things worse. There's a
| difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the
| CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way
| that might work).
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And
| considering the obvious issue of California being one of
| the most expensive places to live on the continent, it
| seems like quite a stretch.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Real data is not fashionable anymore to report. Same in health
| care and education. Tell me where all the f...ing money goes
| and why it's going up all the time. Don't single out one bad
| player but provide a full breakdown. That's what journalists
| should be doing.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Serious answer: there is no need to be fully transparent. The
| majority of voters don't vote that way.
| strangattractor wrote:
| The chronically homeless I encounter in SF are primarily (not
| all) 1. Addicted to drugs 2. Suffering from psychiatric issues.
| No amount of affordable housing is going to fix that. No amount
| of training, educational assistance, universal income etc will
| fix that. They are not in any condition to work or hold a job
| or do personal health maintenance. Give them shelter and they
| wonder off.
|
| Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather
| severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes
| are being spent on housing. These are people that are not
| homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor.
| Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has
| done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida
| communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as
| Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid
| rehousing."{1}
|
| Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have
| %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no
| other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population
| relative to the rest of the country.
|
| The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good
| intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not
| executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to
| promote them and receive money for them despite their inability
| to get results. That is were all the money goes.
|
| {1}https://flhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Good-
| News-f...
| lastangryman wrote:
| All these detailed, complicated arguments. Why is homelessness
| not the same level of problem in the UK? Maybe think about that
| then consider why it's such an issue in the US.
| buzzert wrote:
| Okay, so why is it?
| alex_lav wrote:
| Because homelessness is a symptom of a whole bunch of different
| root causes, and treating symptoms without treating root causes
| can be a massive waste of time and money
| motohagiography wrote:
| California state officials have managed to spend $17B on it, I'd
| say the homelessness problem is working just fine for them. It
| sounds cynical, but this is what "managing," a problem in
| government means - extracting value from it. If you want less
| homelessness, you need fewer people benefiting from it. It's that
| simple. Government isn't about solving problems, it's about
| managing them to the benefit of the constituents who vote them
| back in.
|
| Homelessness is encouraged by California policies that are
| essentially accelerationist, where they create the problem and
| exacerbate it to get the money and power to solve it, and then
| they've got something to manage indefinitely to keep getting
| those things. This is why you have a border crisis, and why your
| neighbourhoods have tent cities. Outside the cadre of people who
| think they will make up the central committee, few actually want
| unlimted centralized governments and policies when life is good
| and peaceful, so agitaing to make things much, much worse is how
| you get popular support to seize control and entrench your
| people. It's not a conspiracy, it's just strategy, and most
| people can't face that because they don't know what power is
| like, or understand what it means when they say it is the highest
| good. Homelessness is the symptom of a much deeper and more
| malignant social cancer, imo.
| crtified wrote:
| The people that society creates, society pays for.
|
| All measures will fail except those which recognise and address
| that absolute and ongoing certainty.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| Forgive me for the vast oversimplification, but...
|
| 17 billion over 4 years (per the article)
|
| 17 billion dollars => 113 million square feet @ $150/sqft 113
| million square feet => 113,000 housing units @ 1000 square feet
|
| This is not a realistic comparison, but thinking about it as an
| upper bounds could be a useful yardstick by which to compare
| actual outcomes.
| avrionov wrote:
| Scott Alexander reviewed the book "San Fransicko" by Michael
| Shellenberger and as part of the review analyzed the top reasons
| for people to become homeless. [1]
|
| Some takeaways from the review: - Number one predictor for
| homelessness are the housing prices. - 30% of the homeless in SF
| are from outside the city
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-
| fransi...
| shuckles wrote:
| That's a widely misunderstood statistic. The Point in Time
| survey asks homeless people about the location of their shelter
| when they last became homeless. For example, a homeless person
| from outside SF who spent a night in county jail or on a
| friend's couch in a Tenderloin SRO unit would count as "became
| homeless in San Francisco" for the purpose of the survey.
| ellisd wrote:
| You can get high on fentanyl ~$1 USD ... there is no stopping a
| sedative crisis at these prices. It's effectively a reverse Opium
| War consuming lives and our communities.
|
| These two accounts have provided a gripping POV of this utter
| humanitarian crisis in SF:
|
| https://twitter.com/bettersoma https://twitter.com/war24182236
| no_wizard wrote:
| what if we gathered up the unhorsed population and actually moved
| them into consolidated areas where they can get the help they
| need? Triage them, medical and dental care, and tougher cases can
| get isolated from less tough ones.
|
| Not all I housed situations are created equal but by not
| acknowledging that we need some kind of strong intervention is
| part of the disservice.
|
| Of course, overhauling zoning laws and the permitting process
| will help with supply. If we could take away some ability for
| local communities to reduce their ability to have vanity zoning
| laws it would go a long way.
|
| You have to solve this problem from both sides.
| reillyse wrote:
| To my mind this is an example of a failing in the federation
| system in the USA. First off, I hope we can agree that the
| homelessness problem in the US is not normal and not something a
| developed wealthy country should have (just so we are all on the
| same page).
|
| The problem I see is that no state can unilaterally fix the
| housing problem because if they do, the unhoused from the other
| states are incentivized to move to the "fixed" state,
| overwhelming their resources and efforts. And yet, homelessness
| seems to be left to the states to solve.
| rank0 wrote:
| Homelessness is absolutely normal sadly. You cannot eliminate
| all homelessness. It's currently <0.2% of the population. Never
| before in the history of humanity have we enjoyed such high
| living standards.
| christkv wrote:
| So they spent 17 billion over the last 4 year on about 115k+
| people or about 140-150k usd per person per year. Yeah there is
| some serious grifting going on.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Have they tried building homes?
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| I don't care anymore. Bus them out to the desert. Set up camp
| there. Provide food and busses into town for those with
| interviews and jobs. I really don't care, just get them out of
| the damn cities. I've seen too many people shit in the bushes or
| just peeing up against a building. Building tent cities on the
| beach and enjoyable areas, etc. I. Don't. Care. Get rid of them.
| I left California for this reason and housing costs.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| This. I have small children, and all the local parks are
| completely unsafe and unusable because of the homeless
| population.
|
| The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead
| they're dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the
| mentally unwell.
|
| I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows
| this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just "oh well,
| what can we do?" About all this. There is a LOT we can do, we
| don't have to live this way. We don't have to put up with any
| of this.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > The parks should belong to families/the broader public,
| instead they're dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and
| the mentally unwell.
|
| It turns out that when you construct a society in which a
| "cost of living" is a normal concept, people without money
| are largely excluded from said society. You've excluded them
| from malls, shopping centers, museums, restaurants, streets,
| government buildings, and anywhere else you can. They can't
| get educated, they can't train themselves, they can't get
| access to healthcare, because we've all decided that those
| services are only available to those with money. Now they
| find themselves in the parks, because it's the only place
| they're allowed to legally exist. But I guess that's not
| enough, because you and the parent poster would prefer to
| "concentrate" them in desert "camps" as your "final solution"
| to homelessness. Really amazing to see the masks off here.
| vore wrote:
| There is a pretty big range of solutions between shanty towns
| and concentration camps in the desert. When you become
| homeless you are effectively excluded from polite society and
| it is pretty hard to climb out of. You have states and
| municipalities trying to tinker at the edges but as many
| other people have pointed out, with freedom of movement the
| localities that are completely disinterested at solving the
| any of the causes will just move their problems onto those
| that do. How would you like it if you were forcibly bussed
| out into a desert concentration camp, away from your support
| networks and people you know? How much would you care about
| polite society if you fell into the hole and now everyone
| just comes and spits on your face like this a little more
| each day?
| palmer_fox wrote:
| Am I a part of the society you are talking about? Or are
| only homeless people a part of it? I and hundreds of
| thousands of other residents of my city want to live in a
| clean and safe city. Is that completely irrelevant?
| vore wrote:
| Where did I say anything like that? In any case, if
| you're shipping these homeless people out somewhere else,
| aren't you just making this someone else's problem but at
| least you don't have to look at it anymore?
| palmer_fox wrote:
| I am not advocating for shipping anyone off to anywhere
| (it wouldn't be effective). However, the prevalent
| opinion that we just need to throw more money on this
| problem, or just silently suffer in the name of
| compassion is/will make things worse.
| vore wrote:
| I hope you never end up on the other side of the situation and
| have to see people on the Internet write about you in such
| contempt like this.
| pedroma wrote:
| Not him, but it would likely be my own fault and weakness if
| I end up like that and people have every right to ridicule me
| for acting ridiculous. That is, pooping on the streets and
| leaving needles everywhere.
| [deleted]
| vore wrote:
| People turn to pooping on the streets and shooting up in
| the middle of the street because they have nowhere else to
| go. Getting hoisted out of rock-bottom is extremely
| difficult, and the longer you slip through the cracks of
| any kind of support the more cemented you get there. If
| society is kicking the ladder out from under you like this
| then respectability is the last thing on your mind. Being
| shipped off to a desert concentration camp is really the
| icing on the cake here.
| palmer_fox wrote:
| The ("progressive") opinion that you express is
| ultimately de-humanizing. You take away all agency from
| people and treat them as mindless victims.
|
| It's all the society's fault, awlays someone else do
| blame. People who poop on the street can't find any other
| place (perhaps, a bush?), people who throw needles on the
| street have no other place to take drugs (perhaps, the
| supervised drug injection site where they get the
| drugs?).
|
| Empathy must come with responsibility and not with a
| patronizing de-humanizing pseudo-compassion. Which is, of
| course, just enablement under a different name.
| vore wrote:
| This talk about not pooping on the street and not
| shooting up in the street is not really solving the
| material issues of homeless people. How does pooping in a
| bush or going to a supervised drug injection site get you
| out of abject poverty?
|
| How is it _not_ a structural problem when homelessness is
| a growing epidemic? Do you think that if every homeless
| person took a little more personal responsibility this
| issue would be fixed already?
| palmer_fox wrote:
| > Do you think that if every homeless person took a
| little more personal responsibility this issue would be
| fixed already?
|
| Yes. A little more personal responsibility leads to
| taking more and more personal responsibility. I dislike
| talking about homeless people as a homogenous group, but
| the visibly/street homeless need to take more
| responsibility for their life in order to improve it.
| There are many resources available that can make their
| journey out of homelessness faster.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Well, it is normal to have such feelings when people are
| harassed by those people. Yesterday, in Texas while I was
| harassed by kids. They used all the slurs and it was so
| bizarre to me. In California, I can't imagine the situation.
|
| It only takes few people to ruin experience for all people.
| closeparen wrote:
| I hope you never end up in a situation where people decide
| not only to leave you in pool of your own urine on the
| sidewalk, but to feel righteous about their activism to make
| sure you're left there.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| Important to remember that every one of us are just a few
| accidents away from being ejected from society too. I try to
| catch myself when I'm looking down my nose at the bum who
| make a mess of my recycling because there is another richer
| person looking down their nose at me!
| 65 wrote:
| Would you care if we murdered all the homeless?
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