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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

#661

Post by geoelectric »

rcpt wrote: post #596

Luckily 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…

There's a difference between an LVT and a property tax. LVT is just on the footprint, the unimproved land, vs. a standard property tax (what Prop 13 more or less freezes) which includes the value of the buildings on it.

George was pretty big on the idea that you only can only ethically tax natural assets taken away from the community--e.g., collect ongoing ground rent in exchange for the right to deed a chunk of land and prevent others from using it--and that those funds should then be redistributed to the community as compensation for their loss. He didn't think we should discourage success by taxing labor, trade, and improvements that don't come from nature.

I agree Prop 13 has been horrible for a lot of reasons. But even without it we wouldn't have anything like a Georgist LVT--we'd just have a lot more rent-taking by the state on improvements, on top of all those other disincentives he didn't like, and likely still with no citizen's dividend/UBI to show for it. Home prices might not be quite so damned wacky, though, if we didn't put such a huge disincentive on turnover.

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

#662

Post by etchalon »

diogenescynic wrote: post #643
hnarn wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shelters are not widely known for being safe and accommodating places.

Most people would chose camping over them.

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

#663

Post by rank0 »

reillyse wrote: post #251

To my mind this is an example of a failing in the federation system in the USA. First off, I hope we can agree that the homelessness problem in the US is not normal and not something a developed wealthy country should have (just so we are all on the same page). The problem I see is that no state can unilaterally fix the housing problem because if they do, the unhoused from the other states are incentivized to move to…

Homelessness is absolutely normal sadly. You cannot eliminate all homelessness. It’s currently <0.2% of the population. Never before in the history of humanity have we enjoyed such high living standards.

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

#664

Post by WalterBright »

acchow wrote: post #651
rcpt wrote: post #596

Luckily 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…

Wages do increase, but then it's all spent on housing. And lately, also spent on healthcare.

The incredible cost increases for healthcare started in 1968 with government interference in it. The more interference, the more it costs.

The same effect happens with every industry the government massively interferes with. For example, education, and real estate.

Look what happens in industries that experience very low levels of government interference, like software. Costs trend to zero.

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

#665

Post by kinghajj »

jdasdf wrote: post #650
rcpt wrote: post #596

Luckily 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

Why not, and what problems would it cause?

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

#666

Post by dbcurtis »

kelnos wrote: post #611
adeon wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around year 2009-2010, I worked in public sector in Helsinki in the real estate department. I worked the phone handling tenants calling and needing repairs. A large portion of the tenants were people from the homeless program. At the time I did not know this program was unusual. My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get…

> I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. My take on it (after living in SF for many years): 1. Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This is…

> Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago, where people were put into horrible conditions in mental institutions.

This. I am old enough to remember those bad old days. We have simply replaced one form of inhumanity with another. There are people who need our compassion and help. We should give it to them. We also need to protect against abuse of and/or by the system. Why is this so hard to accomplish?

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

#667

Post by el_nahual »

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…

I can tell you about the experience with "housing first" approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here.

There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.

In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing.

Why? Because the one condition of getting housing was to join a drug counseling program.

There is an entire line of thought that goes something like "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling? That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"

It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of them will die.

They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example, of a couple living on the street in which one partner is physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.

So a measure that at first glance seems stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may seem like the opposite.

This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that it's not actually as simple as one would think.

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

#668

Post by carom »

Dig1t wrote: post #628
rcpt wrote: post #596

Luckily 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…

There is already an incentive to build densely and provide more housing, developers already want to do this because they make more money by doing so. They are literally not allowed to build anything other than single family homes though, the local homeowners actually control what is allowed to be built. That is to say: the people who have an incentive to keep housing supply low are the ones deciding what is allowed t…

It's really insane. Just remove everything that distorts the market. Restrictive zoning limits competition for a piece of land. Rent control distorts prices. Affordable units make building unprofitable. Get rid of that and housing will be so abundant.

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

#670

Post by dbcurtis »

kelnos wrote: post #623
hellojesus wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I haven't understood is: why don't people move away if they're doing min wage jobs in a place where they are clearly incapable of delivering any quality of life? Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.

Moving itself is expensive. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the time or money to even travel to another location to look for better housing and a better job, let alone the time or money required to actually effect a move. Consider that for many people in this situation, missing a few days of work to look for a new place to live might mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the lost wag…

Not to mention that it might also involve moving away from what little support system that you do have, the cousin that provides child care while you work your second shift janitor job, for instance.
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