A cautionary tale from the streets of San Francisco

Its hard to be 'upwardly mobile' and drop an addiction, find a job, get out of depression, have positive self image - when you are homeless, and every US service designed to help you is fucked beyond repair and stealing so much money.

I once looked at the SF budget for SFDPH and it showed all the roles, budget and costs. Payroll being the highest - but it also stated the number of homeless people in the city

I did the simple math of dividing the budget by the nu,ber of homeless and at that time the number would have equated paying every homeless person $12 an hour. or ~$24,000 per year.

Whichwould equate to UBI for such folks - and one could put stipulations on that such that it automatically made a savings account for the user with some % of that savings going into a fund which would be designed to, with the interest made on investment for that fund - be used to pay for more housing developments, job training etc...

regardless of my lack of expertise in developing homeless help programs (I have thought of several - here is the one I wanted to apply to YC with) I try, and compared to what the city of SF spends and how well their policies work, I think evaluating other options is critically needed.

Here was my concept for applying to YC (this is from ~5 years ago or so)

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'Care Fleet' -- Mobile hygiene and necessities vehicle:

A box truck with a built out full set of bathrooms with capability to self steam sterilize after each use.

A one-seat barber station.

A service of providing clothing to all homeless in the form of, effectively, Scrubs. And not some crazy embarrassing color. Offer them in grey, black, brown/khaki only.

Socks and Shoes.

Basic hygiene kit (tooth brush, shaver, soap, whatever, wipes, female hygiene stuffs)

Allow homeless to take a shower, get a cut, get some scrubs and help info and some hydration and help info.

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How I maintain compassion for the homeless is twofold; I have three precious beautiful children.

So whenever I see a homeless person, I see someones precious baby, a human who was once perfectly innocent.

Whenever I see homeless walking in absolute shreds of clothing, no shoes, or like one sock on, it breaks my heart.

If you have children, look at them - now imagine them walking through the streets filthy with shreds of clothing barely clinging to their bodies and being invisible to the rest of society aside from their disdain for your situation.

See your child in that person.

> You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to engage with the program.

Note that Finland famously has a "Housing First" policy that has practically eliminated homelessness there, so that seems to be a direct counterexample to your comment.

Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag. It's like if we were all getting together to try and solve climate change and someone said "I'm super religious, I spent the last week in nature speaking with God, and it's clear to me that while there are other things we can and should do, this will never work without everyone individually praying every day." We would collectively be like "huh, convenient that the thing you're already super invested in seems to be critical to our efforts here, despite being completely unbacked by evidence...."

It's simply not the case that people will start making better decisions to the point that homelessness diminishes to background noise. It's a non-solution. We have to question the perspective of a leader who keeps pushing clear non-solutions.

The end of the road of the personal responsibility argument is "'good' people shouldn't waste their resources on irresponsible people". But homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility (is anything?), so typically when leaders start talking about it, something else is up.

> most home building... actually increases demand.

Is there data supporting this claim? It seems quite extraordinary that supply would create more demand than it satisfies. That's just not how economics usually works.

If affluent people from around the country are moving to Charlotte, I would think they're likely drawn by other factors, such as their jobs or family roots bringing them there, not by the mere existence of fancy housing and gentrified neighborhoods. If the new development didn't exist, those people would still be moving but would end up choosing slightly lower-end housing -- forcing up the prices and thus forcing out existing residents.

This "making fancy houses only increases home prices" argument seems like a rationalization invented by people who are looking for a reason to block such development. It seems highly unlikely to me that this would actually be true.

Politically, it's easy to be angry at developers for only building high-end housing, when it seems like the real problems are at the low end of the market. However, in reality, you can't expect it to be any other way -- and that's OK, because building high-end homes actually does help the low end of the market too.

New construction is inherently high-end. It's actually hard to build a new house or apartment building that isn't desirable to affluent people -- you'd have to go out of your way to use old design standards and bad materials that don't cost any less but make the home less desirable. This isn't economically viable for developers. So of course developers are always going to target mid-to-high end.

But that's fine, because when you build more high-end housing, then people move up from slightly lesser housing, making that housing available for people to move up to from even lower-end housing, and so on. This eventually makes housing available at the low end of the market for people who couldn't previously afford housing at all -- or perhaps for the government to rent on behalf of homeless people at an acceptable cost.

San Francisco is bizarrely full of terrible 100+-year-old apartments with high-income techies living in them, just because there's nowhere else for them to live. This is a failure. That should be low-end housing, but it's not because there's not enough high-end housing for all the affluent people.

> Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced.

I think these are two separate variables and Capitalism when properly regulated works extremely well (it has moved millions from poverty in China and did the same in the US - wages went up by 350% from 1930-1970).