Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 1001 posts

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

#561

Post by candiodari »

jeremyjh wrote: post #495
shepardrtc wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should they get it for free? They shouldn't get it for free. They should be required to be in recovery programs and have jobs. Create state or federal jobs for them if necessary.

This is great if you don’t want to engage with the actual issues or solve the problem.

Fortunately San Francisco has had decades of social workers "dealing with the actual issues" and "solving the problem". To put it mildly, they didn't solve the issues.

This is a lot better than social workers "helping" people on the street with "treatment".

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

#562

Post by HDThoreaun »

yellowapple wrote: post #424
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…

> Given that California is essentially governed by a single party Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide. > All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Who: landowners. How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the…

LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point, and it's regressive. Throw in some 0% base rate progressive income taxes, pigouvian taxes, maybe a small vat and you're on the right track.

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

#563

Post by jandrese »

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…

It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"

I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.

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

#564

Post by specialist »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #475
hnuser847 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families and forcing them to be responsible for their children, teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street. You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a couple of months ago I watched a very…

Your thesis is that the USA isn't sufficiently punitive towards the poor and working class?

What are some (policy) ideas for making them more desperate, more miserable?

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

#565

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services

This is always the justification for socialist-style programs. It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading. What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find yourself with a lot more homeless than you used to have. Your studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we've seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites more homeless.

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

#566

Post by slg »

khazhoux wrote: post #451
jonny_eh wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Where’s the “victim-blaming”? From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use. How does more housing help them?

From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years back[1]:

15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.

25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people are in shelters.

Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.

So you are partially right that drug use and mental health issues can make sheltering some people more difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either of these issues make up a majority of all homeless people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that people with these issues are the most visibly homeless. The people who are living in their car or a shelter and simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically homeless.

Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.

[1] - https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3423-2019-greater-los-ang...

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

#567

Post by matthew9219 »

skrebbel wrote: post #16
atdrummond wrote: post #8

That’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…

How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”? I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better? I don’t have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue for fewer rules, not more. So I’d like to understand your point better.

People addicted to heroin don't achieve their potential or their aspirations. The compassionate thing to do for drug addicts is to help them stop being addicted to drugs, not give them an apartment where they can do drugs without bothering anybody. Parent commenter is saying the state is doing mostly the latter and little of the former.

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

#568

Post by searealist »

abeppu wrote: post #382
searealist wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bein…

I think you snipping away important context from your quote is a misleading description.

> According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ...

So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.

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

#569

Post by i_am_jl »

drcode wrote: post #541
legitster wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want this person off of the streets for completely selfish reasons to myself . Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere . If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.

Without a recovery program, some people will still just spend their day smashing car windows to get money for drugs, then go home to their free apartment It might still be worth it regardless, but keep that in mind

If that person is currently living on the street, spending their day smashing car windows to get drugs, it's absolutely still worth it.

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

#570

Post by bhhaskin »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #461
x0x0 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do the unhoused have to be housed in high cost SF? The nice thing about doing this as a country is that they can place people not in their highest cost cities.

Unless you force people to relocate, they likely won't relocate themselves.
Post reply on HN