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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

#781

Post by 35997279 »

aeternum wrote: post #683
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…

The way 'housing first' has been implemented in SF is terrible. It is operated as a lottery helping a very tiny percentage of the homeless with a house/apt worth $1mil+. Those numbers will never solve the problem. If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent. The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-p…

Austin has a great housing first community.

https://mlf.org/community-first/

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

#782

Post by janalsncm »

moomoo11 wrote: post #777
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…

I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ...... Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole. I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience le…

> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills.

Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.

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

#783

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_8j50 wrote: post #780

My disagreement with "housing first" is that the state should provide housing indirectly by building regular housing and bringing home prices down along with price regulation and redeveloping urban areas with apartments and condos. I.e.: the housing market is thr problem in cali, not people being homeless (that is just one symptom).

> I.e.: the housing market is thr problem in cali, not people being homeless (that is just one symptom).

A bold assertion, and if your premise is wrong, your solution won’t work.

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

#784

Post by seanmcdirmid »

janalsncm wrote: post #782
moomoo11 wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ...... Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole. I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience le…

> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In ci…

Most people in SF aren’t from California, let alone counting the unhoused population. America has freedom of movement, you just need a bus ticket, no hukou or residency permit needed.

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

#785

Post by ibeckermayer »

jandrese wrote: post #563
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 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…

This idea that the "homeless problem in SF" is primarily a problem of "people being unable to afford homes in SF" is just laughable.

All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.

Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.

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

#786

Post by Izikiel43 »

pixl97 wrote: post #202
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)? Edit: I dug up some data: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht... > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. > “This is a local crisis and a homegrown prob…

>What is the solution to that? So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement. The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people…

What you describe is what happens in Canada. Most homeless in Canada end up in Vancouver, because of weather and assistance offered. The other provinces, with the 6 months freezing winter, not as much assistance, and I think a bit of enforcement, causes the homeless to end up at Vancouver.

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

#787

Post by gretch »

kinghajj wrote: post #665
jdasdf wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land Value Tax simply does not work. It fixes nothing, and causes severe problems

Why not, and what problems would it cause?

I’m not the poster you replied to, but for starters, the problem is not that we don’t have enough money. The whole article is about how CA spent $17B and got so little for it.

So how is having even more state money via LVT going to do anything? We’re just funneling this money into whatever black hole it’s going into

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

#789

Post by kerkeslager »

jdjsbaosbs wrote: post #411
kerkeslager wrote: post #341

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and…

> shelters are not homes > Solution to homelessness is not mental health services > Solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless... I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes. How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property and give it to people witho…

> I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes.

I didn't say we should stop spending on those things, I said that spending money on those things does not solve homelessness.

> We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home.

Notably, in places where this has been tried, the effectiveness of giving people homes is such that it's cheaper to give them homes than to do what we're doing.

> What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc.

If your criticism is that I didn't draft a detailed legislation in a Hacker News post: that's the normal way that people write Hacker News posts. These are obviously not unanswerable questions as you are presenting them to be, but there would need to be some work to figure out what good answers are. Obviously.

> Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home?

Surely you could come up with a solution to this problem if you were trying to solve it instead of argue against helping homeless people.

A higher minimum wage, perhaps? Better aid for people in lower income brackets?

> What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless?

Bro, your moral compass is broken. This isn't difficult--you're just making up absurd problems. If a person is homeless and they don't qualify, the qualifications are wrong. That's obvious, and the only reason it's not obvious to you is that your goals are about maintaining a fundamentally broken system rather than creating a society that actually cares for its citizens.

> If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing?

Given we demonstrably have billionaires "working" for money far beyond the ability to spend the money they make, I'm not sure why you suddenly think that greed stops at "I have a place to live" when it's convenient for your argument.

> How does that work in reality?

How does what we're doing work in reality? (It doesn't).

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