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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

#401

Post by vore »

pedroma wrote: post #340
vore wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not him, but it would likely be my own fault and weakness if I end up like that and people have every right to ridicule me for acting ridiculous. That is, pooping on the streets and leaving needles everywhere.

People turn to pooping on the streets and shooting up in the middle of the street because they have nowhere else to go. Getting hoisted out of rock-bottom is extremely difficult, and the longer you slip through the cracks of any kind of support the more cemented you get there. If society is kicking the ladder out from under you like this then respectability is the last thing on your mind. Being shipped off to a desert concentration camp is really the icing on the cake here.

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

#402

Post by jrowen »

kerkeslager wrote: post #341

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and…

Interesting points. Are there more effective programs elsewhere that build more hospitable/restorative spaces? Put another way, are there organizations doing "the right thing" based on the most current research?

Having lived and worked near a lot of homeless people it's fascinated me for years but aside from volunteering a few times have not delved too deeply into the issue.

Anecdotally, much of the "disturbance" created by the homeless seems to stem from a small number of individuals that many would describe as "too far gone." Is that a fair take and is there an effective solution to that?

What is a reasonable estimate for the percentage of homeless that more or less prefer living peacefully on the street as long as they can get by? Is this a segment to be specifically facilitated, are there efforts to do so?

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

#403

Post by shuckles »

abeppu wrote: post #237
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.

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 de…

Most of the $5k/tent was in the services required for a high-needs population. As someone who has been impacted by a building set on fire by a meth addicted neighbor, simply placing high needs homeless people who often have serious mental health or drug abuse issues, in apartments isn't the end of the story. In many cases, it makes the lives of other residents of the building worse, as evidenced by the issues (including high rate of nuisance evictions) plaguing SROs in SF.

Santa Clara County tried a random assignment housing first experiment in 2021 where homeless people given apartments died at roughly the same rates from drug overdose, etc. than homeless people who didn't receive housing.

For these reasons and more, it makes a lot of sense to not acquire one-off units in existing buildings for PSH, and Prop C set asides for PSH instead of shelter or whatever the city deemed most useful for homeless people is kind of downstream of nonprofit politics and not a statement about voter mandates or what's best for homeless people.

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

#404

Post by shuckles »

bluGill wrote: post #249
bombcar wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem. I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than…

We got rid of institutionalization for very good reason. Many of them outright abused the people under their care. Cleaning up the system is hard. Many of the homeless have mental issues such that they cannot figure out how to report abuse even if it would be listened to, and of course institutions have easy means to ensure you can't report things. (or you can report, but the person doing the abuse investigates and f…

It was a combination of abuses at psychiatric facilities and the belief that new drugs would "solve" mental health issues.

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

#405

Post by jrowen »

rcme wrote: post #345
kerkeslager wrote: post #341

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and…

> The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive down the prices of housing Giving homes to the homeless would increased demand for housing, which would increase the price of houses, no?

I think they mean building mass affordable/free new housing rather than using existing stock.

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

#406

Post by ARandomerDude »

tlogan wrote: post #388
luma wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. As much as Republicans and Democrats may not want to admit it, we need each other for accountability.

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

#407

Post by arcticbull »

wonderwonder wrote: post #321
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…

Why the homeless move to CA Good climate Cities provide cash payments to them Legal marijuana Open air drug markets Soft on crime prosecutors Liberal population that wants to provide for them Note: I make no judgement value on any of these items, just proposing reasons

- Good climate: Absolutely. It's much tougher being homeless in the winter in Chicago than it is in California.

- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.

- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]

- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.

- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?

Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.

[1] https://disa.com/maps/marijuana-legality-by-state

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-many-homeless-americ...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

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

#408

Post by aidenn0 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #298
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.

Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth. I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is sky…

I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.

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

#409

Post by tlogan »

kmonsen wrote: post #397
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 is my fear for the country as well as the republicans are (in my opinion you can disagree) at the very least partially going crazy. We desperately need at least two parties working for a good government. California needs more checks and balances, and so does the country.

I 100% agree. If you want to run for office here is San Francisco you need to be democrat. Which means that you need to be very nice to people which you know they are not good.

On the other hand one really cannot be republican because of things like this: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/anti-trans-repub...

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

#410

Post by web3-is-a-scam »

Government spend X on problem, it doesn’t work and actually gets worse. In other news, water is wet. More at all.

Disclaimer: this doesn’t apply to when government is trying to kill people outright. Government is extremely efficient at killing people on purpose, and not much else.

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