Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

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

#411

Post by jdjsbaosbs »

kerkeslager wrote: post #341

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and…

> shelters are not homes > Solution to homelessness is not mental health services > Solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless...

I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes.

How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property and give it to people without homes? We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Also where should these homes be? Should they all be in urban areas like SF or perhaps in smaller cities/towns where the homes are cheaper? Which neighborhoods should these homes be in?

I don't know what the solution to homelessness is, but this doesn't seem like a viable solution.

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

#412

Post by shuckles »

convolvatron wrote: post #377
bluGill wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't completely agree. From talking with them, a fair number of the homeless in SF are from Lake County and the Central Valley. Went to a shitty school with no job prospects. started on crank. ended up in SF because this is a place where a methhead can enjoy their lifestyle and get by.

Hey, that's not fair to Humboldt!

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

#413

Post by fullspectrumdev »

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 is the money going?

Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind housing.

Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland).

There’s no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private. And that’s a whole clusterfuck that seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.

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

#415

Post by phendrenad2 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #341

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and…

You didn't go into depth enough about why shelters are bad. They're not even a mild alleviation to living on the street, they're actually worse. There are homeless criminals who go to shelters just to steal from other homeless. Many homeless become addicted in shelters. We spent $17b making the lives of the homeless worse.

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

#416

Post by hnarn »

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 housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.

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

#417

Post by shuckles »

avrionov wrote: post #246

Scott Alexander reviewed the book "San Fransicko" by Michael Shellenberger and as part of the review analyzed the top reasons for people to become homeless. [1] Some takeaways from the review: - Number one predictor for homelessness are the housing prices. - 30% of the homeless in SF are from outside the city [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransi...

That's a widely misunderstood statistic. The Point in Time survey asks homeless people about the location of their shelter when they last became homeless. For example, a homeless person from outside SF who spent a night in county jail or on a friend's couch in a Tenderloin SRO unit would count as "became homeless in San Francisco" for the purpose of the survey.

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

#418

Post by jandrewrogers »

aidenn0 wrote: post #294
DoreenMichele wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside. It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.

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 coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has mild weather all year, better than many parts of California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit in a rain shadow.

If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.

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

#419

Post by jonny_eh »

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…

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness

True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

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

#420

Post by palmer_fox »

vore wrote: post #401
pedroma wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not him, but it would likely be my own fault and weakness if I end up like that and people have every right to ridicule me for acting ridiculous. That is, pooping on the streets and leaving needles everywhere.

People turn to pooping on the streets and shooting up in the middle of the street because they have nowhere else to go. Getting hoisted out of rock-bottom is extremely difficult, and the longer you slip through the cracks of any kind of support the more cemented you get there. If society is kicking the ladder out from under you like this then respectability is the last thing on your mind. Being shipped off to a deser…

The ("progressive") opinion that you express is ultimately de-humanizing. You take away all agency from people and treat them as mindless victims.

It's all the society's fault, awlays someone else do blame. People who poop on the street can't find any other place (perhaps, a bush?), people who throw needles on the street have no other place to take drugs (perhaps, the supervised drug injection site where they get the drugs?).

Empathy must come with responsibility and not with a patronizing de-humanizing pseudo-compassion. Which is, of course, just enablement under a different name.

Post reply on HN