California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by amanaplanacanal » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:34 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #219

aorloff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.

It's more than this though. Families can't stay together, belongings get stolen, safety can be an issue, you can't bring your pets, etc. There are a lot of reasons those kinds of shelter can't work for some people.

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

#262

Post by bluGill » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:34 PM UTC

josho wrote: post #215

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…

I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable. Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies. The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den t…

We are talking about California - the conservatives don't have power.

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

#263

Post by ishjoh » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #219

aorloff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.

I live in a midsize city outside of California that has 3 shelters downtown. 1 shelter dropped the sober requirement trying to house those people. They had to reinstate the rules within 24h because 2 employees had been assaulted, and a serious fight had broken out that required hospital care for both people involved. It is sad state of affairs.

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

#264

Post by thebigwinning » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #193

DoreenMichele wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar to what I've seen in HI. I imagine there would be more in HI if it didn't cost an expensive plane ticket.

SF and further north are hardly nice weather locations.

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

#265

Post by thereisnospork » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

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…

It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type program for violating the laws that make them incompatible. Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory' policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like property damage and illegal drug use.

[0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.

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

#266

Post by bombcar » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #133

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…

I definitely see less homeless people in places that go to -40 in the winter. Now I don't know why, maybe they still exist but are less visible. Perhaps the threat of homelessness is a lot scarier when it is cold outside. Maybe homeless people in those climates move. I don't know, but anecdotally it does seem like there are much fewer homeless people in cold places.

They certainly exist. https://www.hmismn.org/point-in-time-count-information

But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).

(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).

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

#267

Post by vore » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

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…

I hope you never end up on the other side of the situation and have to see people on the Internet write about you in such contempt like this.

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

#268

Post by amanaplanacanal » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

hackernewds wrote: post #245

bombcar wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "missing middle" that we cannot provide in our current society. Nobody can provide "flop houses" where drugs and alcohol use are ignored unless you're harming someone, so there's nothing between sleeping rough under the bridge and being sober in a shelter. The liability alone would prevent any non-government agency from doing it, and even the government is scared.

Why should government provide this? It creates a perverse incentive as we observe in modern day SF

The context is getting people off the street. If we don't care about that, then no, it shouldn't.

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

#269

Post by thebigwinning » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

beerpls wrote: post #192

quest88 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.

It’s a warm climate with large cities which provide sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless over other avenues of living 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…

Why do they live in SF and further north if it's for weather?

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

#270

Post by kelseyfrog » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 7:37 PM UTC

pauldenton wrote: post #213

josho wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it. Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals

They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.