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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

#931

Post by Detrytus »

rank0 wrote: post #624
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…

Why isn’t moving out of the most expensive city in the world an option? I believe the biggest factor is mental illness. The addiction and homelessness are the symptoms/results. (Obviously not in every case) We’re at record low unemployment. If you’re able and willing to work you can 100% make enough money to pay rent somewhere…it just might not be in SF. Idk why people feel that everyone should be entitled to live in…

0.2% is not "among the lowest in the world", or at least among OECD countries. Many countries have the rates way below 0.1% And not just rich countries, Brazil for example has 0.05%

https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pd...

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

#932

Post by horns4lyfe »

2devnull wrote: post #913
Mizoguchi wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take a stroll down the streets of SF or Portland and try to tell me it’s not an issue of drug addiction. There are already shelters in these cities for people in dire financial straits that aren’t addicts; the problem is they (and the rest of us) have to share these and other public spaces with deranged meth addicts. That’s what makes the current system untenable.

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

#933

Post by ericmcer »

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…

I’m all for housing and support to help people get back on their feet. I just don’t understand why that housing has to be in SF/Oakland.

It is a crazy dense and expensive area. There are cities that would gladly take in low skill workers who are subsidized by the government. Do they offer them transfers and housing in other cities?

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

#934

Post by michaelcampbell »

hnarn wrote: post #416
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…

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…

Kind of a tangent, but perhaps not. This clause:

> has been proven to work in Finland

could be parsed in 2 different ways.

> (has been proven to work) in Finland

or

> has been proven to (work in Finland)

Which has radically different meanings for applicability to the US.

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

#935

Post by Amezarak »

HEmanZ wrote: post #638
chinchilla2020 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proven to work in Finland Finland, a tiny baltic nation that has almost nothing in common with the USA.

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.

Population #s and GDP mean very little, and thinking we can move the needle on our favorite issues by looking at these needles is the source of a lot of problems. People think you can just spend more and more money on problems and fix them. There are things money cannot buy. And often, the processes behind the accumulation of the money are what contributed to the problem in the first place.

As an example of just one contributing factor, population churn has an extremely negative impact across nearly the whole spectrum of social issues. What is the population churn in SF vs Finland?

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

#936

Post by imtringued »

1letterunixname wrote: post #821
aeternum wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Resettlement somewhere cheaper is the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, this requires relocation and doesn't scale. This is something the federal government should pay for and coordinate.

It requires the relocation of businesses, not people.

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

#937

Post by makingstuffs »

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…

My partner and I recently returned from a road trip through Cali and were absolutely shocked by the societal issues in San Francisco.

You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.

It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.

I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.

Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.

One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.

That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.

And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.

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

#938

Post by madsbuch »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #100
madsbuch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug-addicts is something you interpret. It is specified that they are homeless. Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people. For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.

I can see that you're not in California, so I feel like I should reiterate that drugs are a massive problem among our homeless population here. It is something that needs consideration when trying to help them. The main problem with just giving people $1,000/mo is that it is nowhere near enough to get off the street, but more than enough to continue fueling a drug problem.

I have lived in San Fransisco an commuted through Tenderloin.

I am not opposing that they are statistically related. But it is not OK to assume that people are drug addicts when they tell that they are homeless. That is normal human decency.

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

#939

Post by loeg »

loeg wrote: post #308
aidenn0 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be. 1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...

The coast is relatively mild compared to inline Oregon or Washington, but winters are still wet and cold (especially in Washington).

> inline

"inland," sorry.

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

#940

Post by scarmig »

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…

Leading question: suppose someone moved to SF, started out homeless, moved to supportive housing for a few months, and got kicked out and became homeless again. Are they counted in that oft-cited "70% of homeless people are SF natives!" figure?

ETA some additional numbers[0]:

Of that [71]%, the top six places they were housed before their most recent loss of housing:

With Friends/Relative (31%)

Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner (21%)

Subsidized Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing (11%)

Hotel/motel (9%)

Jail or Prison (8%)

Hospital or Treatment Facility (4%)

So only 21% of that 71% actually rented their own place. Granted, the "with friends/relatives" can cover some situations where I'd agree they count as originating from SF, but also covers things like people moving here and crashing with a friend for a week before being kicked out.

Note also that any homeless who has become housed at any point of their homelessness (including jail, hospitalization, supportive housing) would then persist in the "has been housed in SF before" stat.

[0] https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co... , see page 31

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