It's spent on scam charities that waste their resources handing out $75 boxes of syringes to junkies. You might as well set the money on fire--it would be less destructive than how the money is being spent now.
California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#642There 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…
I think the biggest thing these programs fail to take into account is that a significant portion of San Francisco's homeless population is not from San Francisco. I've met kids on Haight Street who said they'd rather be homeless in SF than in an apartment in Cleveland. Are you housing all the homeless people who migrated to SF, and then keep housing all the new people who show up?
The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#643There 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 not a housing problem, it's a drug and mental health problem. Many of the unhoused people you see could stay in shelters but don't--often the areas near shelters have the most camps near them. They simply don't want to follow any rules and now conditions are so accommodating that being outside in good weather is better than staying in a shelter with a curfew.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#644Society refusing to draw a link between the homelessness/addition crisis in the States and the pharmaceutical companies becoming drug dealers/pushers of opioids that flooded the country is honestly shocking.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans became opioid addicts because they were prescribed unnecessary pills by their own doctors, and became hooked (the risks of opioids have been known for what, thousands of years?). We have barely given the pharma industry a slap on the wrist for the harm they've caused and the direct link between the two crises is never drawn in the public sphere.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Can you cite any studies on that?
It's called moral hazard. It persists in any giveaway program.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#646Moved from Ventura/Santa Barbara to Palm Beach FL, due to the alot of shortcomings that California has faced. Witnessing several overdoses outside my condo near the beach was the final straw for me. Too heavy to be around. I still miss the contrast of the beach and mountains, but since after the Pandemic, things just didn't feel the same in California. I hope things can turn around in but it seems like there are issues that stem from the highest offices of government and go beyond the issue of homelessness.
Palm Beach is pretty cool, West Palm Beach/Jupiter area reminds me a lot of Santa Barbara. West Palm Beach to Miami is about the same distance from Ventura to LA. You get a lot of the benefits of Miami without being directly in the madness. A lot of young professionals working in Finance and Tech in Miami are moving to West Palm because of the new BrightLine train that goes from downtown WPB to downtown Miami.
I haven't really got out much and explored due to crazy workload, but want to start attending meet ups here and meet some people my age. A lot of the problems that I had with California, don't really exist, at least to the same degree, out here. It's pretty comfy.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#647Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago: > THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power: > As productive power increases, rent tends to increase eve…
Another way of addressing the problem (in terms of the framing above) is to make land unnecessary to labor. Universal work from anywhere would substantially reduce the ability to extract rent because it would increase competition among a much larger group of landowners. Why do you think all the landowners are so eager for the peons to RTO?
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Martin cited a study from May 2018 by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which found 75 percent of the people on the street in Los Angeles County had a home in that same county before they lost it. It also showed that 65 percent of the unsheltered homeless had lived in that county for at least 20 years. Only 13 percent were from out of state. Source: https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelli…
Those stats are outdated and generally somewhat dubious—what was the methodology here? Nonetheless, it is clear CA generates a lot of homeless. The linked study from 2018 claimed 52,765 homeless in LA county, while the count by the same group performed in 2022 tallied 69,144. Either there's a been a massive influx of people on the streets or their methodology is improving. Perhaps both. Pretty wild to think about.
Population keeps growing and prices keep going up. Native californians are being displaced onto the streets.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 factor…
Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
Very difficult to tease out the definition of various terms in studies and they are mostly trying to play to their anticipated audience.
This is evident, for example, if you look closely into the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
Re: California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
#650Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago: > THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power: > As productive power increases, rent tends to increase eve…
Land Value Tax simply does not work.
It fixes nothing, and causes severe problems