We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works • Hacker News Board

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#91

Post by gorbypark » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #60

How do you deal with an apartment complex and it’s surrounding neighborhoods full of (previously)homeless people? The Realistate market isn’t gonna allow it to devalue their property, hence you get these NIMBY campaigns

I always thought the best idea would be to randomly sprinkle in these housing units throughout the community instead and of having them all together in one complex. For example, each new development should have a percentage of units allocated to homeless programs, and which actual specific units should be chosen at random to prevent developers building small/horrible/clustered together units for the program.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#92

Post by trynewideas » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

Ancalagon wrote: post #46

LarryMullins wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a NIMBY perspective, a city-run homeless camp sounds even worse than a normal homeless camp. At least in the latter case you can hope that the city will get rid of the camp soon, but if the camp is made by the city itself then what hope can you have? So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.

Don't these permanent "homeless camps" already exist though? When I was in Portland last January I saw a large grouping of what I can only describe as very-tiny homes - essentially glorified shacks on rollers and stilts - which were obviously city-sanctioned homeless encampments next to a bypass.

Nope. Those were unenforced camps. The mayor is proposing reserving city-owned or -leased property, setting up on-site services, and requiring swept homeless people to move to those city-run outdoor camps or single-night shelters or be charged.

The liability alone that Wheeler's proposing is incredible. It'll cost tens of millions to set up (by his estimate) and there'll be lawsuits against the city within days, guaranteed. Nobody will be helped, hundreds will be harmed, and people who aren't chronically homeless will wind up in jail. The camps won't have enough capacity, so nothing fundamentally changes on the ground. Nobody wins.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#93

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #33

pessimizer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.

> Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally. Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies. Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly sin…

Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race.

A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#94

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #42

LarryMullins wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...) Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.

> That's trivial; prison. This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.

I have numerous conervative family members, acquaintances, and friends. That comment proves one knows one's adversary remarkably well.

Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#95

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 10:03 PM UTC

LarryMullins wrote: post #79

frosted-flakes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because people are free to migrate anywhere within a country's borders, so cities with lots of social services get overrun with a disproportionate amount of people wanting to use them. These sorts of policies need to be implemented at a nation-wide level for them to be truly effective.

"Thing that fails in the small scale needs to be implemented on an even bigger scale" is a hard sell. How do you convince a state that thinks California is a hell hole that they should implement Californian policies in their own state? This doesn't seem possible to me. If there can be a politically practical solution at all, I think it must be one that can be demonstrated to work in the small scale.

> How do you convince a state that thinks California is a hell hole that they should implement Californian policies in their own state? This doesn't seem possible to me.

First step would be to identify the specific things that make California a hellhole v. the things California gets right.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#96

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

Ancalagon wrote: post #90

m3kw9 wrote: post #70

Since homeless people are homeless because they can’t afford a place, a solution is to prevent more homelessness by allowing people that are about to be homeless seek govt subsidies for rent. It’s another way to lower homelessness.

Subsidies will just cause further rent-seeking unfortunately

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: land value taxation would fix that.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#97

Post by jasmer » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #78

jasmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically something that resembles a home aka apartment. 'Shelters' are not close to that. They are places to 'kind of sleep' and that's usually it. It's not a 'home' if you have to share a room with 40 other smelly people and you have to be out by morning. There is a lot of theft, violence, many homeless find it much more peacable to sleep rough than in a shelter. Many people are so messed up and many incorrigably i…

> But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense. And it's a good goal, too. I mean, to achieve that, you'd have to aggressively build apartments, because it's not like we have 50% of flats being empty and people ending up on the street because nobody will take the government's money and rent out apartments. Once you do that appropriately, some of the pressure w…

They don't want new housing in specific areas and it's a 100% canard of an issue.

There is tons of space in Cali and no reason whatsover to build cheap housing in the most choice spots. It's ideology.

Just get the housing built.

LA County and Cali in general seems to be incompetent on the level of corruption in many ways which is sad.

And FYI state shoud be sharing this problem, moving individuals into already built housing in different states.

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#98

Post by swalling » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

LarryMullins wrote: post #35

trynewideas wrote: post #29

Portland, cited in the article, announced it's beginning yet another sweep of homeless encampments yesterday. At the press conference announcing it, the mayor - who's been ordering sweeps his entire tenure - admits they don't and haven't ever helped the people being swept. He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when s…

From a NIMBY perspective, a city-run homeless camp sounds even worse than a normal homeless camp. At least in the latter case you can hope that the city will get rid of the camp soon, but if the camp is made by the city itself then what hope can you have? So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.

Actually there is a huge amount of local support for these camps politically. Both in issue polling [1] and in terms of which candidates won election to city council, etc.

Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.

1. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/11/housed-portlande... 2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-may...

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#99

Post by A6gYPfxNas » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

is that like the science that was supposed to stop the spread?

Re: We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works

#100

Post by walnut_eater » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 11:32 PM UTC

trynewideas wrote: post #29

Portland, cited in the article, announced it's beginning yet another sweep of homeless encampments yesterday. At the press conference announcing it, the mayor - who's been ordering sweeps his entire tenure - admits they don't and haven't ever helped the people being swept. He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when s…

There's a Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode about government run homelessness camps on the US West Coast in 2024. I see we're working on making this happen.