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

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

#231

Post by EatingWithForks »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #170
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…

but when you do the research Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief. Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence: - San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime - Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF,…

"Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4% outside California.

Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."

At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.

https://sfstandard.com/public-health/san-francisco-homeless-...

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

#232

Post by ModernMech »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #210
MentallyRetired wrote: post #197

I don't care anymore. Bus them out to the desert. Set up camp there. Provide food and busses into town for those with interviews and jobs. I really don't care, just get them out of the damn cities. I've seen too many people shit in the bushes or just peeing up against a building. Building tent cities on the beach and enjoyable areas, etc. I. Don't. Care. Get rid of them. I left California for this reason and housing…

This. I have small children, and all the local parks are completely unsafe and unusable because of the homeless population. The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell. I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just “oh well, what can we do?” About all this. Th…

> The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.

It turns out that when you construct a society in which a "cost of living" is a normal concept, people without money are largely excluded from said society. You've excluded them from malls, shopping centers, museums, restaurants, streets, government buildings, and anywhere else you can. They can't get educated, they can't train themselves, they can't get access to healthcare, because we've all decided that those services are only available to those with money. Now they find themselves in the parks, because it's the only place they're allowed to legally exist. But I guess that's not enough, because you and the parent poster would prefer to "concentrate" them in desert "camps" as your "final solution" to homelessness. Really amazing to see the masks off here.

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

#233

Post by Reptur »

Logical fallacies:

Hasty generalization: The title of the article, "California Spent $17 Billion on Homelessness. It’s Not Working," makes a general conclusion about the effectiveness of the spending based solely on the fact that the problem of homelessness still persists.

False cause: The article implies a false cause fallacy by suggesting that the fire at the Wood Street encampment was the primary cause that forced a decision to clear the camp, oversimplifying the issue by ignoring other factors. False dilemma: The article presents a false dilemma by portraying the situation as a binary choice between offering limited shelter beds or allowing individuals to continue living in unsafe circumstances, neglecting potential alternative solutions.

Appeal to emotion: The article utilizes emotional language and personal stories to evoke sympathy and support for the individuals living in the Wood Street camp, appealing to the reader's emotions rather than presenting logical arguments.

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

#234

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues ...

Wait, what?

Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.

ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).

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

#235

Post by bluGill »

quest88 wrote: post #148
tptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.

CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)

There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.

There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.

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

#236

Post by Justin_K »

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…

I think you are equating the fact that most elected officials in CA are Democratic to this being a political hit piece. With that logic, is anything negative about our largely Democrat body of officials off limits?

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

#237

Post by abeppu »

aorloff wrote: post #181
abeppu wrote: post #171

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 thos…

We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street. But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.

It's not a binary.

SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites.

Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services.

Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.

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

#238

Post by bombcar »

gamblor956 wrote: post #211
abeppu wrote: post #171

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 thos…

Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure. In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimat…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job".

It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.

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

#239

Post by hackernewds »

abeppu wrote: post #171

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 thos…

Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money directly does not help them.

Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.

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

#240

Post by indigochill »

josho wrote: post #162
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…

You’ve correctly identified the issues with media today. Rage inducing articles are easier to read and get more views. As soon as you introduce facts then very quickly it becomes a nuanced debate on the issue which is far less interesting because and worth less revenue. We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material. I don’t k…

Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a panel where people could ask them questions. I asked them, given that journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why does the business model instead align on advertising?

The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.

Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:

1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.

2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.

And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.

Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.

So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.

The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.

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