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California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

wsj.com

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Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#171

Post by abeppu »

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-...

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#173

Post by Tiktaalik »

thegrim33 wrote: post #146
Tiktaalik wrote: post #119

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 bee…

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 e…

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.

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#174

Post by stuaxo »

godelski wrote: post #120

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, t…

Guilty of not reading the article yet - even the headline reads like a political ad.

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#176

Post by josho »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #149
godelski wrote: post #120

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, t…

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 peopl…

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.

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#177

Post by nradov »

crooked-v wrote: post #28
jerojero wrote: post #7

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 ha…

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.

If those people bothered to actually vote instead of just complaining online then the problem would be less severe.

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#178

Post by jimt1234 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #144

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 th…

> 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 ^^^

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#179

Post by joshstrange »

zacharytelschow wrote: post #141
rottencupcakes wrote: post #3

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.

If it's a federal failure why are the homeless highly concentrated in certain areas?

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.

Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working

#180

Post by guardiangod »

soperj wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

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.

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