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Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

theguardian.com

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Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#51

Post by jonathankoren »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #41
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO…

From what I understand there have been several successful pilot projects that are variously shut down or are considered inappropriate for other cities (politically unpopular). Utah just straight up housed people to great success. NYC has a massive homeless population but they also put a ton of money into housing their homeless- also to fairly decent success. For drug addiction, there have been successful needle provi…

Utah’s program of housing the chronically homeless has a lot of misunderstandings. Mainly about that it serves the chronically homeless, which are a minority among the homeless.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678779/Is-Utah-still-...

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#52

Post by Spooky23 »

Cities with services often attract homeless and people looking for a better deal. My dad ran a section 8 program, and his backlog plunged when NYC started accepting more people... you could wait months upstate or show up in Brooklyn and be in a free temporary placement in hours or days.

Other places will mention this to clients. South Carolina was pretty notorious for giving sick Medicaid patients to northeast states with enhanced Medicaid in the past, for example.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#53

Post by nickevershed »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #7

While they should definitely consider serving up a more static version for mobile (couldn't scroll on Firefox Android), the experience of reading this article on my desktop was truly awesome. I absolutely loved the graphics, cinemagraphs, and entire experience, and really do think it added immensely to the story itself. Is there a name for this style of article? Do they use some existing JS library or is it all hand…

We call them "big scrollies" in my newsroom, I have also seen the format referred to as "Scrollytelling". There are a few libraries such as graph-scroll and scrolllama which work well with d3 specifically, but otherwise you can just make your own.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#54

Post by mikemotherwell »

michaelchisari wrote: post #47
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO…

There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. Anybody with a drug problem should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I'm addicted to X" and get into treatment immediately, free of charge. Anybody with a mental illness should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I can't take care of myself because X keeps happening in my brain" and get into tr…

If you look at this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... - the US has quite low homelessness rates. The problem is the USA is a massive country in area and population. The opportunities vary greatly, as do the resources. REALLY low macro homelessness (think nationally) can still lead to very high rates at a micro level (think Tenderloin).

Where can the USA look for similarities? Singapore is one city state, as is Hong Kong. Australia's cities are 600 miles apart. The EU has a language issue moving from city to city, despite London to Paris being 1/10th as far than SF is to NYC. The USA is pretty unique here.

The one similar country is China. The GDP per capita by Chinese prefecture makes the US look positively egalitarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prefecture-level_citie...

China solves their issues by essentially banning movement between areas. The US could never solve their issues that way, for a variety of reasons.

So I'm not sure what the solution is to micro level high homelessness, but macro level low homelessness.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#55

Post by jakelarkin »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #34
jakelarkin wrote: post #16

this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on th…

It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO…

we've rebuilt like 15 countries (after bombing them) in the past ... somehow its totally impossible to temporarily house a fractional percentage of people in our country and make sure they get a job or their meds instead of addicted to heroin

theres so many bs political excuses; bad zoning, bad building regulation, bad union rules, bad health regulations, bad drug laws, civil legal liability, cost of Rx drugs ... as if government doesnt have have power to fix those things. it's a feigned helplessness because the poor inherently have no political leverage/value to those in power.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#56

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #34
jakelarkin wrote: post #16

this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on th…

It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO…

Great strides in helping the homeless can be achieved by giving them housing. It almost sounds like a tautology, and it triggers outrage in certain segments of the population, but once people have that stable foundation they can then work towards rebuilding their life.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#57

Post by [deleted] »

habosa wrote: post #31

Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/201…

[deleted]

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#58

Post by mncharity »

I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted around the country, albeit more slowly?

A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogous to buying bus tickets out of town?

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#59

Post by scottlocklin »

mncharity wrote: post #58

I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted around the country, albeit more slowly? A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogou…

Erm, which city? I just moved here.

Re: Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

#60

Post by ericfrenkiel »

habosa wrote: post #31

Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/201…

Considering there is existential incentive to lie about being from San Francisco, this survey qualifies as a biased source of information. It should not be held up as proof that whatever is working would work better if only we would please double the budget.
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