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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

#441

Post by hnuser847 »

jonny_eh wrote: post #419
fullspectrumdev wrote: post #413

Having lived/spent time in a few places with varying homeless problems and approaches to homelessness, I find it fucking depressing every time I read about how badly - and inefficiently - the US handles it. Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country. Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck…

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

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

#442

Post by x0x0 »

apstls wrote: post #425
jonny_eh wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

How many homes could $17B make?

Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.

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

#443

Post by jonny_eh »

hnuser847 wrote: post #441
jonny_eh wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates.

Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...

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

#444

Post by jonny_eh »

apstls wrote: post #425
jonny_eh wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

How many homes could $17B make?

We don't even need to have the government build the homes, just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge positive change.

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

#445

Post by x0x0 »

hnarn wrote: post #416
freddybobs wrote: post #302

There is an episode of the "you're wrong about" podcast, that discusses homelessness. In that episode there are several discussion about several projects in California around homelessness. Those projects provided housing. The studies based on those projects showed that overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services. The podcast goes into more details, but as I remember this was because * It remov…

The strategy is called “housing first” and has been proven to work in Finland: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free? What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars ho…

What people do consider is that it's extraordinarily unfair for many people who struggle with housing costs -- imagine what eg SF-area rents do to a cook or cleaner earning even $50k annually -- if we're going to provide that for free to junkies.

Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.

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

#446

Post by seanmcdirmid »

spydr wrote: post #423
jonny_eh wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of drug use

Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of homeless you don’t notice because they aren’t raving like a lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems, but they are sadly often conflated.

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

#447

Post by vore »

palmer_fox wrote: post #434
vore wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pretty big range of solutions between shanty towns and concentration camps in the desert. When you become homeless you are effectively excluded from polite society and it is pretty hard to climb out of. You have states and municipalities trying to tinker at the edges but as many other people have pointed out, with freedom of movement the localities that are completely disinterested at solving the any of th…

Am I a part of the society you are talking about? Or are only homeless people a part of it? I and hundreds of thousands of other residents of my city want to live in a clean and safe city. Is that completely irrelevant?

Where did I say anything like that? In any case, if you're shipping these homeless people out somewhere else, aren't you just making this someone else's problem but at least you don't have to look at it anymore?

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

#448

Post by seanmcdirmid »

chagen wrote: post #438
spydr wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of drug use

"Definitely the result"? I think you might be confusing correlation with causation.

That really isn’t true either. Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the housed, it isn’t weird that some of them eventually lose their support network. There are definitely economic homeless in Seattle, they just aren’t as visible as the fent addicts.

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

#449

Post by labcomputer »

lr4444lr wrote: post #124
youreincorrect wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! My least favorite part of this was the local media pretended this wasn't true. They pretended it vociferously despite this being such an obvious lie.

The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this? It is done in NYC, and it was a major bone of contention that the high level of service was effectively magnetizing the city for homeless in other parts of the country to come here, or for cities even to bus them here. The law is a little vague on the matter, but the prevailing belief by the NYC administration is that anyone who can make it to the agency's doorstop a…

They do, and if you dig into them, the numbers show that most people are not from SF.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co...

By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless population "became homeless while living in SF."

Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10 years at the time of the census (the agency only has buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect the amount of time the person lived in SF before becoming homeless).

So, although they may have technically "become homeless while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years since they first got here, including time while homeless). Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25 when they first became homeless.

When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years).

It's probably even lower when you consider that the current episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only marginally housed when arriving).

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

#450

Post by seanmcdirmid »

hnarn wrote: post #416
freddybobs wrote: post #302

There is an episode of the "you're wrong about" podcast, that discusses homelessness. In that episode there are several discussion about several projects in California around homelessness. Those projects provided housing. The studies based on those projects showed that overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services. The podcast goes into more details, but as I remember this was because * It remov…

The strategy is called “housing first” and has been proven to work in Finland: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free? What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars ho…

In Finland, it is housing first with a live in social worker. Also, for many, they never get a job or anything like that (their mental illness or substance abuse problems are never cured), it’s just that it is cheaper for the Finnish government to house these people than not.
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