191–200 of 1001 posts
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…
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California's homelessness problem is not caused by other states offloading their homeless to California.
Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.
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
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…
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.
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> 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.
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 a…
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.
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>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?
>> 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 the…
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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?
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.
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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…
> 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?
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Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.
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 prob…
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.
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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?
If you're being paid by the government to manage homeless people, your incentive is to keep them homeless. Else your contact would end.