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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

#701

Post by hellojesus »

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…

I get all those points, truly, but at the same time find it hard to belive that a dedicated person couldn't scrape together enough money for at least a plane ticket or bus ride out of town. They could prematurely contact a church in a destination city to see if the church had any charitable funds to spare them for temporary housing as they look to find work.

I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net. The mechanism for that is charity. It's much harder nowadays with disconnected communities, but reaching out for help often works.

I myself spent years with belongings only as burdensome as I could carry (at worst case) or pack into my sedan. It made moving from one place to another easy, and I could always rent a cheap hotel to live in since I wasn't burdened by possessions.

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

#702

Post by kelnos »

redeeman wrote: post #603
nielsbot wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, call it handouts. But if you just care about the budget, providing housing is the cheapest way to solve the problem. Will some people "take advantage" of this arrangement? Sure. Does it matter that much?

yes, it does... otherwise feel free to send me about three fifty :)

But why does it matter, if the alternative is objectively worse for everyone concerned, even the taxpayer funding this "free" housing that some might abuse?

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

#704

Post by [deleted] »

meowtimemania wrote: post #577
worik wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets You are cherry picking statistics Housing first has been shown over and over again to be a better solution than expecting people to recover their lives before they get any help What are your counterfactuals? How many die with no help? Where do those numbers even come from? Basically I am calling this out as disinformation. Lies

I'm quoting a tweet from the president of Y Combinator. I'm not against giving people housing, but I think there needs to be a sobriety requirement. Why would putting someone in a house cure them of their addiction? Put them through rehab, then give them a house when they leave rehab.

[deleted]

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

#705

Post by tiahura »

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…

So my ancestors could move from 18th Century Europe to the US, but someone in SF can’t make it to Nebraska?

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

#706

Post by throwaway98211 »

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…

Homelessness isn't a monolith.

It's a spectrum of people who face housing insecurity due to economic circumstances, to people who resist/actively shun societal contacts that help us all function (often fueled by serious substance addictions.) While the solutions that have been embraced by San Fransisco's current electorate (free cash/housing/no rules) could make sense for the former, that doesn't mean it's a good solution for the latter. And unfortunately it's the latter side of the spectrum that exerts hugely outsized impact in terms of both resources spent and negative draw on the rest of society.

So yeah... more housing would be great, but affordability shouldn't be used as societal gaslighting to excuse the current mess we have in San Francisco. Until the city finds the resolve to enforce some minimum standards of accountability, the problem will only get worse, and the rest of us will just vote with our feet.

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

#707

Post by DoreenMichele »

hellojesus wrote: post #599
jandrese wrote: post #563

Earlier 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…

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.

About 2.5 million people living close to the official poverty line left California for other states from 2005 through 2015, while 1.7 million people at that income level moved in from other states – for a net loss of 800,000.

https://www.ca-sba.org/california-exports-its-poor-to-texas-....

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

#708

Post by patall »

dangwhy wrote: post #620
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…

Why are all the lofty examples from countries that are hostile to refugees/immigrants like Scandinavian countries. Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.

I think you are mistaken, though I do not know how. Scandinavian countries accept quite many immigrants. I.e Sweden in 2022: 3.6/1000, compared to US (2020!): 3/1000. Both sources from wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_S...

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

#709

Post by Brainfood »

reillyse wrote: post #639
seizethecheese wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations buy homes to rent them out. This is neutral for housing supply. The real issue is a growth in households but a lack of growth in housing stock. We need to build more housing.

Well one problem is once corporations get involved is money starts flowing to influence Politicians to do the Corps bidding. So, I wouldn't say it's neutral.

Thank you

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

#710

Post by yellowapple »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #562
yellowapple wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point

The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.

> and it's regressive

It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).

Meanwhile:

> VAT

That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.

With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.

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