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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

#271

Post by hackernewds »

russdill wrote: post #212
godelski wrote: post #120

This reads as a political ad, not a news story. The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, t…

California has a housing crisis and there is no political will to fix it. Not wanting low cost housing in your neighborhood is something that unites people very strongly across the political spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

The implication that there is a Boogeyman political system that doesn't want to house the homeless in their neighborhood is suspect and laughter inducing. Politicians need the will of the people to persist.

It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.

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

#272

Post by ModernMech »

pc_edwin wrote: post #54
alpineidyll3 wrote: post #18

Half the dysfunction with political efforts to ameliorate homelessness is the toxicity of touching a difficult issue. Homelessness is beyond any one term or individual to solve. Certainly you cannot cure the addictions, disabilities or madness of these unfortunate people overnight. The only solution people would actually like is if the homeless were to disappear.

I can solve it in under a year. These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern humanity. They should either be forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence. Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast thrown away to some dark…

> I can solve it in under a year... forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.

Yes, if you criminalize homelessness and imprison all the homeless in hospitals and prisons, I think you've technically solved homelessness. Your problem though is that to do so, you've gone full fascist, so now there's a new problem.

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

#273

Post by bombcar »

goatlover wrote: post #196
guardiangod wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are just going to trash the place. Vancouver has been building and rebuilding support housing because the units get trashed and literally ripped apart after a week. Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.

Then incarceration in mental institutions and long term drug rehab facilities seems like the only answer.

Maybe we need to do Australia again, but instead of for debtors it's for drug rehab. Just make sure the entire island we pick is drug-free. (Yes, there are obvious issues with this and it's likely incompatible with our current view of what a "free society" is).

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

#274

Post by abeppu »

gamblor956 wrote: post #211
abeppu wrote: post #171

What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways. A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At thos…

Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure. In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimat…

> For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse

Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?

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

#275

Post by tomcar288 »

the key to solving homelessness is not affordable housing, regulation or vast amounts of spending or even UBI. The answer is UBL ==> Universal basic Land. It's the idea that every person should have some means of having some land and being allowed to build on it. maybe not in downtown, maybe not any specific area, but at least somewhere. you can't just tell people to whole up in a homeless shelter. I found out that the life expectency of the average homeless person is in their 40s, Yikes! there should be someplace for everyone on this planet. give people some land, or let them buy it for a relatively reasonable amount and don't charge them rent (property taxes), at least for up to a certain value (say the first 50K or 100k). Once you have land, and freedom to build on it, you can build your home or have a construction company do it for you, in a way that's cost effective.

Even the native american indians and countless others in the global south with far less income per capita had/have homes. It shouldn't be so hard: the problem is land use policy and regulations.

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

#276

Post by rahimnathwani »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #231
rahimnathwani wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but when you do the research Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief. Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence: - San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime - Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF,…

"Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4% outside California. Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homele…

Thank you for the link.

But I'm skeptical of those data, because:

1. The data are from folks with an agenda:

- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.

- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)

2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.

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

#277

Post by bluGill »

bombcar wrote: post #253
MentallyRetired wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not causation. There's also a strong correlation between homeless people and parking garage density. Housing prices are high where there are people. People are homeless where there are people. It comes with the territory. Throw in amazing weather and states bussing their homeless to CA and it becomes a very attractive proposition for someone without a home. If there was a correlation then sending the homeless to…

taps the sign https://xkcd.com/1138/ There are always more homeless people in the city than in tiny rural towns, because the homeless people in the tiny rural towns move toward the city or get chased out. It's also true that there are numbers of people in those far rural communities that would end up quite homeless if you forced them into the city. Imagine someone on social security living in a dilapidated trailer on…

The the tiny rural towns take care of their own. There are no homeless because everyone knows "joe" is messed up, and so they ignore him living in an otherwise abandoned house (they are around) thus making "Joe" not homeless, and plant a larger garden so he can harvest something. They won't allow someone new move in, but Joe grew up there and so they let him continue to live there. In the city you can't know everyone and so it is much easier to ignore the homeless in a way that doesn't help the homeless.

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

#278

Post by thebigwinning »

mullingitover wrote: post #244
s1k3s wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable. The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. (Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans t…

Everyone wants cheaper stuff. The question is how to allocate limited resources.

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

#279

Post by cscurmudgeon »

josho wrote: post #215
abeppu wrote: post #171

What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways. A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At thos…

I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable. Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies. The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den t…

> My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.

For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?

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