California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working • Hacker News Board

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

#891

Post by conductr » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:03 AM UTC

yks wrote: post #852

suzzer99 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In all fairness, homeless on Haight (and GG Park to a lesser extent) is a pretty specific category of people and I’d not extrapolate any statistics just from them.

It’s a subculture that attracts some people. The weather in California alone attracts people, especially transients, from places like Cleveland as well

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

#892

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #866

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #783

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> 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.

Not bold at all since everyone but the super rich struggles with housing there, worse than any other state.

They do. But the people on the street would have trouble affording rent anywhere in the nation. SF has a very mild climate, and lots of social services, so it’s relatively better than other places to live outside. Like, why be homeless in low rent Houston when you can easily hop a bus to LA, SF, or Seattle?

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

#893

Post by bombcar » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:06 AM UTC

jlawson wrote: post #573

commandlinefan wrote: post #565

Earlier 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,…

Otherwise known as, "If you subsidize something you get more of it."

It’s not universal - libraries exist everywhere and lend books and movies for free and they’re used but not overused.

So there may be some level of housing that is better than nothing for the homeless but still desirable to get out of for those who can.

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

#894

Post by HWR_14 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:07 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #882

HWR_14 wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one who lives in a $1mil+ home (absent subsidies) is middle class.

Anyone who lives in just a $1 million house in LA or SF is more than likely middle class, not even on the upper end of it.

You have a skewed sense of the middle class. Assume it costs $50,000 a year to live in a million dollar house (which seems on the low end of reasonable.) The median tax-home pay for a household in San Fransisco is $84,500. So you think most people are spending 60% of their take-home pay on housing?

Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.

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

#895

Post by bandrami » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:07 AM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #830

bandrami wrote: post #723

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Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US. So there may at some point be a required tradeoff but the US isn't there yet. What Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits that soak up billions of dollars in public money without actually providing significant housing for homeless people: instead…

Canada is more on a “pull” system with immigration. They pick and choose who and how many they want. Regardless, when he says you cant have both he clearly means its not sustainable. Not that its literally impossible to hold both positions at some moment in time.

The US is the largest "pull" immigration attractor by raw numbers.

> he clearly means its not sustainable

It's an interesting theory, but it would take arguing for. Keep in mind I'm in the "one billion Americans" club.

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

#896

Post by bandrami » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:08 AM UTC

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #842

bandrami wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US. So there may at some point be a required tradeoff but the US isn't there yet. What Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits that soak up billions of dollars in public money without actually providing significant housing for homeless people: instead…

>Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US Canada is a joke of a country and basically a vassal state of the United States, they couldn't even shoot down a balloon over their own territory without US F-22's from Alaska. Talking about them and how they spend their money/the outcomes they get is like discussing the "rich" 35 year ol…

So we agree Canada has both a strong welfare state and high immigration levels?

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

#897

Post by conductr » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

The top result I found said this equates to about $100k a person which is just the cost of care likely, even private prisons cost similar if not more and that’s probably more efficient as it’s somewhat controlled

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

#898

Post by Mizoguchi » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #762

adeon wrote: post #502

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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…

Finland also has a very robust social safety network unlike California/US. Homelessness is usually a symptom of something else. Addiction, mental health issues, financial crisis of some sort, etc. Most of these are escapeable given the right support. But once you pile them all on with no escape - well then you have market street. If you don’t fix any of the other issues then you just end up throwing money in a bottom…

It takes a huge effort to sober up and it is almost never a voluntary action.

Having experienced drug addiction, even with a strong support system of relatives and friends rallying around you with love but also holding you accountable for your recovery and dragging your arse to therapy three times a week, making sure you stick to the program and take your medications, with all that it is still very hard to get out, particularly if you are on stuff like heroin and meth.

I just don't see how the homelessness problem in the US will ever be solved just by wishful thinking that by giving people a home, meals, clothes and clean needles they will by themselves get well and leave the streets.

It will never happen that way, and the right solution, which is forced rehab and medications, is ironically seen as inhumane.

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

#899

Post by fwungy » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #895

nonethewiser wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is more on a “pull” system with immigration. They pick and choose who and how many they want. Regardless, when he says you cant have both he clearly means its not sustainable. Not that its literally impossible to hold both positions at some moment in time.

The US is the largest "pull" immigration attractor by raw numbers. > he clearly means its not sustainable It's an interesting theory, but it would take arguing for. Keep in mind I'm in the "one billion Americans" club.

Sure, but let's make sure we can feed and house everyone, and most importantly that oppressed populations in the US are not backstabbed with the needs of new immigrants taking precedent. It is not ethical to ask African Americans and others to wait more generations for justice.

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

#900

Post by jxramos » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:42 AM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #111

polski-g wrote: post #89

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If you're being paid by the government to manage homeless people, your incentive is to keep them homeless. Else your contact would end.

This same nonsense logic would apply to the police, firemen and nurses too. Are the firemen out there discouraging sprinkler systems because they want to keep their jobs? Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical, purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the street.

that's an interesting point, I think for those professions theres sufficient quantity of a baseline demand that they don't need to artificially create demand. However it's not unprecedented, there was a crazy story a friend shared with me like 2 years ago I think. Something from this François Bonivard, Geneva Chronicles in the 1500s that details this doctor trying to contaminate his town to secure future plague patients. I tried to find the primary source but all I could locate was this odd website that happened to hit some of the text my friend emailed me https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=11047763. The original French text is in the archive however https://archive.org/details/leschroniquesde00bonigoog

A more modern example I recently stumbled across maybe 2 weeks ago was this crime story of this wicked nurse working in the ICU who was thrashing patients on his floor with air embolisms. The reason, the guy wanted to prolong the patients stay to ensure more overtime hours https://youtu.be/dgWcplHgAjU?t=645. Absolutely unbelievable.