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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

#911

Post by mbgerring »

mbgerring wrote: post #819
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that some of the smallest, most expensive, most mismanaged and ideological 7x7 mile real estate in the US is being used as the dumpster for humans in need of serious medical attention and societal support. SF can barely build a public toilet without it turning into a taxpayer trough feeding frenzy, so expecting it to be the Mecca of the homeless, the addicted and the downtrodden is comedic at best, a…

It’s not, 70% of unhoused people in SF started out housed in SF (source: every homeless count for the last decade, and my tenure as editor-in-chief of SF’s Street Sheet). People are unhoused here because housing is unaffordable. This is not complicated. We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system where…

Love to get downvoted for stating extraordinarily well documented facts with which I have firsthand experience. Nice place you all have here!

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

#912

Post by 2devnull »

HWR_14 wrote: post #881
bombcar wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if you rounded up all the homeless in California and dumped them in Finland you’d quickly overload their systems. After all the entire country of Finland has fewer people than the SF metro area (5m vs 7m).

The systems in Finland wouldn't be overloaded if Finland got the SF tax base as well as the homeless problem.

The tax base is correlated with population size.

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

#913

Post by 2devnull »

Mizoguchi wrote: post #898
coffeebeqn wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

That’s a solution to drug addiction. Homelessness is not coterminous with drug addiction. You can be a drug addict with a home quite easily. It’s hard to be homeless and not use drugs or drink. You have numerous incentives to use and almost no incentives not to.

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

#914

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

fragmede wrote: post #657
HEmanZ wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bay Area is about the same population as Finland. And it has a higher gdp per capita than Finland. I agree that we are working with more “technical debt” than Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won’t work. But strategically I don’t see a major difference.

The Bay Area doesn't control immigration and cannot set its own monetary policy. Some problems need to be solved at the Federal level, but the Bay Area does not set Federal policy.

Neither does Finland, the EU controls immigration from almost all of the surrounding countries, and the ECB controls monetary policy.

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

#915

Post by 2devnull »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #785
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…

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…

You overestimate how much talent it takes to live indoors. Living in a house and being a drunk or junky is actually much more common than being a homeless drunk or junky. Drugs and alcohol do not magically deprive one of the ability to live indoors. Have you ever heard of a crack house? Totally possible to be a housed druggie.

Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.

Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.

The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.

What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.

I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.

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

#917

Post by moomoo11 »

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…

so you skipped over the part where I said that almost everyone who becomes homeless is off the street within two weeks?

The people who continue sleeping on the street are the other group I mentioned. and yes they come to CA from other states because the laws here are loose and weather is nice every single day.

Refusing to stay in a shelter because drugs aren’t allowed. Instead of helping people wean off hard drugs, SF allows open air drug markets run by gangs. The “homeless” issue will always exist this way.

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

#918

Post by goatlover »

moonchrome wrote: post #250
bombcar wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem. I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than…

Implying that if you don't want to live in rule based housing you should be institutionalized ?

If the alternative is you're causing problems for the public like creating unsanitary and unsafe conditions, then yes. If you don't do those things like the invisible homeless, then no of course not. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be help for those homeless people getting back to having a home, but that's a different matter. If you really prefer being a vagrant, don't trash or block public places and nobody will care.

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

#919

Post by than3 »

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…

I agree.

SF has a lot of issues and the money went to places that were ineffective with only a small portion going to housing first.

17B shows this isn't a homeless problem, this is a corruption and accountability problem.

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

#920

Post by than3 »

mbgerring wrote: post #911
mbgerring wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not, 70% of unhoused people in SF started out housed in SF (source: every homeless count for the last decade, and my tenure as editor-in-chief of SF’s Street Sheet). People are unhoused here because housing is unaffordable. This is not complicated. We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system where…

Love to get downvoted for stating extraordinarily well documented facts with which I have firsthand experience. Nice place you all have here!

FWIW, I upvoted; but I agree this is an ongoing problem on HN and really any place that allows people to downvote based on how they feel.

You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts and/or be doing this to promote a certain propagandist narrative. There's really no way to combat it or tell given the site design.

Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote, greyed out at 0, hidden -1, delisted/invisible -2) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or more accurately bots) here don't hold. Its why I think most current social media should be outlawed (as its currently designed).

It interferes with communications which are an important signal over public discourse for our representatives to take action. They stop being responsive and representing when they can't receive meaning from their constituency because its an intentionally jammed/noisy channel and they so far have failed to take any action to remedy that jamming, which can have grave historical consequences.

When there's no effective representation, the rule of law eventually breaks down.

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