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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

#831

Post by gamblor956 »

boucher wrote: post #571
ripberge wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that LAHSAs homeless count is a good source of data. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-24/doubts-r...

I don’t know how relevant this story is to the question of whether people who are homeless in California are from California. In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places. If someone wants to share other data a…

When even the LAT is calling out LAHSA's numbers, you know that they can't be trusted...

That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.

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

#832

Post by rcpt »

geoelectric wrote: post #661
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…

Yes you're right. Undoing Prop 13 wouldn't mean instant Land Value Tax. But Ill still maintain that Prop 13 is pretty close to a polar opposite of Land Value Taxation

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

#833

Post by nemo44x »

MentallyRetired wrote: post #197

I don't care anymore. Bus them out to the desert. Set up camp there. Provide food and busses into town for those with interviews and jobs. I really don't care, just get them out of the damn cities. I've seen too many people shit in the bushes or just peeing up against a building. Building tent cities on the beach and enjoyable areas, etc. I. Don't. Care. Get rid of them. I left California for this reason and housing…

Agreed, get them out of functional society. I’m sick of the Quaker quasi religious Progressives who think they can cure everything. It’s like dude, these are broken fucked up people. Get them out of society and try and rehab whatever ones still have something left. Just get them out.

We used to have asylums. Maybe it’s time to bring these back and house these people in them with whatever medication can sedate them. Not saying bring back the lobotomy but maybe we institutionalize people that are obviously crazy?!

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

#834

Post by rcpt »

gretch wrote: post #787
kinghajj wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Prop 13 distorts incentives. It's why we have private country clubs in the middle of Los Angeles, dilapidated shacks on Google's global HQ, and surface parking lots in San Francisco proper.

It's also why California has the highest impact fees in the nation by a wide margin.

We should end Prop 13 and make it budget neutral by ending our other taxes. But even if we repealed Prop 13 and then set the money on fire it'd be a win for housing.

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

#835

Post by abeppu »

searealist wrote: post #568
abeppu wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city.

Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.

Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.

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

#837

Post by rcpt »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #718
TehShrike wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that most houses in the US are owned by the people who live in them.

Moreover, it's irrelevant. Demand vastly overshadows supply, hence the insane prices. That's it. There isn't remotely enough of a basic human need. Everything else is window dressing until we address that fundamental, econ. 101 problem.

Demand would go way down if the government would stop favoring real estate investment with ridiculous tax incentives.

Mortgage interest deduction 30 year fixed rate mortgage Opportunity zones 1031 exchanges Deprecation deduction

The list goes on forever and none of it helps

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

#838

Post by rcpt »

_jab wrote: post #771
Brainfood wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow thanks everyone for the replies! I hear you on homes but housing overall - apartments included should not be owned by corporations for investment purposes imho. Rough stats I’ve seen are 25% of homes are now owned by institutional investors. And 44% of CA residents are renters. Having a quarter of the inventory taken off the market means the prices are going to go up. Land is expensive. We can build more. We can…

I'd been of the impression that corporate home ownership is mostly surging in places like the South and Sun Belt, where housing prices themselves are surging. Housing prices in California have been pretty stagnant since Covid, at least compared to much of the rest of the country. California real estate isn't actually a great investment for these companies right now.

Right. Price to rent ratios in California means that when you buy the only thing you get is a bet on real estate. New landlords are cash flow negative by wide margins.

Wild speculation with no fundamentals isn't attractive to big firms.

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

#839

Post by frankfrankfrank »

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…

What all, and I mean all of those measures miss, often even intentionally, is that homelessness is a symptom, not the problem.

People like throwing money at homelessness because it is a subconscious absolution for their own guilt in causing it by being part of a machine that defrauds the mass of humans through money printing, i.e., fraud, that sees the value of someone’s labor diluted in order to provide ever more worthless currency to the decadent neo-aristocratic class that is also heavily represented in this forum, including myself.

Want to end homelessness? I know you don’t, but if you did, because that would mean you wouldn’t have all the money you have that was pilfered from others through deception and fraud. But if you did, then we would stop the massing theft through fraud that is money printing, aka inflation, aka fraud; selling one thing, delivering something of lesser value, dilution, theft by deception.

Then our benevolent government wouldn’t have to spend any money, because the value of labor for the homeless would allow them to have dignity that our class steals and robs them of, regardless of the government alms we throw them. Even the government money is not even our own money, but overwhelmingly also yet more of other peoples money that was stolen and defrauded through debt, taxes, and money printing.

We are all no different than Escobar that was relatively generous with his money to keep the vile enterprise going on the backs of people’s suffering.

Yes, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people who do not actually want to solve a problem, they just want to feel good about themselves.

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

#840

Post by repsilat »

neilk wrote: post #826
ibeckermayer wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hardc…

Those are the homeless you can see. You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system. But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty. And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something. There are so many steps before p…

> Those are the homeless you can see.

Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.

Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.

Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.

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