So they spent 17 billion over the last 4 year on about 115k+ people or about 140-150k usd per person per year. Yeah there is some serious grifting going on.
California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me just quality a bit further: homelessness is a failure of the neoliberal ideology (land free markets/privatization never worked, from the enclosures [1] to modern times, see Georgism for a solution [2]) and further a failure of the metaphysics of meritocracy based in desert-people's belief "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground", which simply isn't the case today, and i…
If we're going to put the SF homeless problem on "neoliberal ideology", we should also give "neoliberal ideology" (e.g. free markets/trade/globalization) credit for lifting almost a billion people out of poverty in developing nations (mainly China, India) in the 00s.
On that note, we should also give communism credit for lifting billions out of poverty in China
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.
The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable. The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. (Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans t…
> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.
So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.
That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.
Everyone wants that solution. No one wants that solution in their neighborhood. Even unsubsidized low cost housing.
> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]
I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.
But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
California's homelessness problem is not caused by other states offloading their homeless to California.
I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount o…
Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).
>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 journali…
I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures.
As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.
We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.
Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#317Earlier 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.
I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be. 1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...
The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.
West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.
East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.
In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.
It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?
The Skid Row Housing Trust situation does sound bleak, but insofar as "housing first" is meant to provide a safe and stable environment that can enable other kinds of life improvements, I dunno that the housing they were providing fits the bill.
> its portfolio is heavily weighted with early 20th century hotels with tiny living spaces, communal bathrooms and kitchens
> Residents complain that lax security allows intruders to have easy access to the building and that one resident disrupts the entire building.
> While giving a tour of the building to a Times reporter, a tenant pushed open the disruptive man’s door
> Residents of the Hart alleged they frequently had to use buckets in their rooms as toilets.
> Los Angeles County departments of health services and mental health warned the trust of habitability and safety issues that were causing clients to decline housing in its buildings
Suppose you live in one of these, and every time you go to the bathroom or the kitchen, you feel unsafe (anyone could be in the building), or are going to encounter various triggers (how much harder is it to get clean if there's drug use still all around you?), and are still subject to a lot of stress, disruption and uncertainty caused by your living situation. It seems like this organization was ambitious in the number of people it could house, but took real compromises in the quality of that housing. And it depended on very high occupancy to be financially even close to viable.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-26/skid-row...
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#319That’s because Cali’s approach is insane. They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle. I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless…
It's the "I'm gonna give you a social welfare check to fuck off" approach.
Let's not pretend society really wants to hug these people or employers want to hire them.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their needs is the peak of inhumanity.
Drug-addicts is something you interpret. It is specified that they are homeless. Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people. For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.
And some people become poor because they are addicts or have mental health issues and refuse treatment.