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The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

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Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#21

Post by pleb_nz »

nine_k wrote: post #11
pydry wrote: post #7

I remember seeing favelas in Brazil next door to ultraluxury apartments 10 years ago thinking that this is probably what the future of the US was going to be like if wealth inequality steadily kept climbing. And here it is. r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".

I'd say that many of the homeless are homeless because they could not live in the society. This is why they ran out of money and housing, not the other way around. What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.

"This is not a (purely) money distribution problem."

Agreed, it's a much deeper issue in modern society.

But treatments like those you mention are not a complete solution. They're a sticking plaster on a wet wound.

Society will need to change at it's core and the issues show worse in places where the biggest changes are needed.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#22

Post by rfwhyte »

So much of the discussion around homelessness these days essentially boils down to "How can we move these people to a place where we don't have to look at them" instead of "How do we build a society where homelessness doesn't happen in the first place."

So many people also try to lay the blame at the feet of the victims here, but drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness, but rather symptoms of a broader societal pathology of which homelessness is just another symptom.

As long as things keep going the way they're going, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we're just going to see more and more homelessness, especially with the financialization of housing that's current ongoing at a disturbing and accelerating rate.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#23

Post by zactato »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #19
scotuswroteus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Bay Area homeless are from the Bay Area originally

Can you cite that source? In the past, these types of surveys are filled with methodology errors. A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted.

This is SF specific, but I bet it holds true for the whole bay area Page 18 https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#24

Post by Proven »

pydry wrote: post #7

I remember seeing favelas in Brazil next door to ultraluxury apartments 10 years ago thinking that this is probably what the future of the US was going to be like if wealth inequality steadily kept climbing. And here it is. r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".

No post body was provided.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#25

Post by more_corn »

nine_k wrote: post #11
pydry wrote: post #7

I remember seeing favelas in Brazil next door to ultraluxury apartments 10 years ago thinking that this is probably what the future of the US was going to be like if wealth inequality steadily kept climbing. And here it is. r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".

I'd say that many of the homeless are homeless because they could not live in the society. This is why they ran out of money and housing, not the other way around. What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.

What about the doctors he talked to who just moved to Oakland and are saving up to get an apartment? What about people making $11/hr serving coffee and can’t get more than 20hrs wk because the boss doesn’t want to pay benefits? Or the school teacher making $42k/yr? If rent is $3k/mo a lot of people get squeezed out.

Sure there are people who can’t cope and can’t function, but we regularly pay people far less than it costs to live, and that is the leading cause of homelessness. And even the people with fragile mental health or substance addiction are far more likely to overcome those issues if they have housing stability.(see the housing first initiative in Utah for evidence)

What’s the answer I hear you asking? Build. More. Housing. Housing prices in the Bay Area go up 15% a year. More people move here than we build housing by a factor of 3. Pop quiz from Econ 101. What happens when demand grows at 3x the rate supply does? Since we’re not stinkin commies we probably don’t want to say people aren’t allowed to move here, so the supply side of the equation is all we have to work with.

Many cities have figured this out. Pick the most successful one and copy it. Take a look at Vienna for starters. I leave that research as a task for the reader (it’ll be fun trust me)

Without drastic intervention on the housing supply side the problem will continue to get worse as we continue to squeeze the most vulnerable people out the bottom of the housing market.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#27

Post by pydry »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #20
pydry wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American investors who swing liberal try very hard to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "I'm a good person who cares about homeless people" and "I want my portfolio to really excel". The two are not compatible, though. This is very much reflected in American investor owned media (all media, pretty much). This is, realistically, why Americans perceive the cause and effect of homelessness and poor mental health to…

San Francisco's Housing First program has been an expensive failure. The only real beneficiaries were and are the owners of the SROs. My research indicates similar outcomes in some European locales, while Finland appears to be an outlier with markedly better success than, say, Scotland. Providing no-strings-attached housing in the United States appears to do little but get rain off people's heads. That is not really…

Apparently SF housing first program spent between $4-$14 million to spend on temporarily renting out cheap motels.

That's supposed to be expensive? That's pathetic. It'll provide temporary accomodation for a handful of people at most.

I understand the political imperative to declare it a failure though. House prices uber alles.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#28

Post by nisegami »

scollet wrote: post #16
nine_k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that many of the homeless are homeless because they could not live in the society. This is why they ran out of money and housing, not the other way around. What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.

> they could not live in the society The society is broken then. When are people going to reconcile this?

Coming from someone who relates a lot to the idea, but manifests it in vastly different ways, I'm not convinced that society needs to be "for" everyone. Some people just can't exist within it.

Re: The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

#30

Post by blacksmith_tb »

vanusa wrote: post #12

I can definitely go with this "pay them to build and manage their own homes" idea. As long as what they build is up to code.

A program like Habitat For Humanity[1], which does exactly that, would have to scale up enormously to house everyone on the street, but could at least serve as a model. I have volunteered on single-family builds, but for big multi-unit buildings they tend to not use volunteers as they require more actual experience in the building trades (and being bonded and insured I think).

1: https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership

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