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

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

#381

Post by luma » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #339

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…

Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given that California is essentially governed by a single party, it is subject to corruption and inefficiency. Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clea…

This parses as "I don't know what's wrong but I know it's the Democrats" which isn't exactly insightful nor helpful.

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

#382

Post by abeppu » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

searealist wrote: post #306

s1k3s wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.

I think this is a misleading description of the situation.

Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.

> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.

> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...

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

#383

Post by 221qqwe » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

zehaeva wrote: post #283

sovnade wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction. Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc. If the solution was easy, some…

Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people. You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well. [0] https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...

You can't really be homeless in Finland during winter for very long though.

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

#384

Post by justin_oaks » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

vmfunction wrote: post #26

with $17B, we can literally 3D print a bunch of micro housing. Seems like money is still wasted in Bureaucrat, red tap and some kind financial fraud.

With that level of money, you could hire lots of smart people to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem.

You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide data. And then you could use that money to implement small scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still have billions left over.

For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.

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

#385

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

labcomputer wrote: post #327

majormajor wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build. Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them: Where do you put them? For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like…

I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc). It would be like having two new cities the size…

I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex.

It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?

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

#386

Post by axus » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

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.

Why does the housing need rules, if it's "single-family homes"?

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

#387

Post by irrational » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #294

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.

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...

Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain. Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up in the fall.

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

#388

Post by tlogan » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:32 PM UTC

luma wrote: post #381

tlogan wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given that California is essentially governed by a single party, it is subject to corruption and inefficiency. Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clea…

This parses as "I don't know what's wrong but I know it's the Democrats" which isn't exactly insightful nor helpful.

I do not think it is Democrat. It think it is because it is one party state.

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

#389

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:32 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #385

labcomputer wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc). It would be like having two new cities the size…

I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex. It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only lo…

I understand such people may be particularly fragile. But the rest of us move for a job all the time.

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

#390

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 8:34 PM UTC

EatingWithForks wrote: post #216

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places-- what is their sampling methods, etc? I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been dis…

Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you can’t fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.