California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working • Hacker News Board

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

#771

Post by _jab » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:44 AM UTC

Brainfood wrote: post #697

HDThoreaun wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large corporations don't actually own many homes. It is true that they started buying them during covid, but that is mostly because they realized they are extremely good investments due zoning making it hard to build them. In order for housing to be affordable it can't be an investment. It needs to maintain its real value over time, meaning the wage to price ratio remains constant. If housing wasn't a good investment…

Wow thanks everyone for the replies! I hear you on homes but housing overall - apartments included should not be owned by corporations for investment purposes imho. Rough stats I’ve seen are 25% of homes are now owned by institutional investors. And 44% of CA residents are renters. Having a quarter of the inventory taken off the market means the prices are going to go up. Land is expensive. We can build more. We can…

I'd been of the impression that corporate home ownership is mostly surging in places like the South and Sun Belt, where housing prices themselves are surging. Housing prices in California have been pretty stagnant since Covid, at least compared to much of the rest of the country. California real estate isn't actually a great investment for these companies right now.

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

#772

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:45 AM UTC

hourago wrote: post #738

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…

> 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?" A lot of people seems to accept tax cuts for billionaires much higher than anything spend on the poor. It is all about framing and repetition. Humans like to help other humans. The problem is that there is a push towards selfishness from the people that has t…

It's less about "why won't you help these people" and more about "what have you done with the $100k I paid you last year, when will you be satisfied?"

The only defense is electing people that stop the bleed and force the government to prioritize what they spend on. Talk amongst yourselves and decide if building a new park or helping homeless people is more important.

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

#773

Post by davchana » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:45 AM UTC

hellojesus wrote: post #599

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…

What I haven't understood is: why don't people move away if they're doing min wage jobs in a place where they are clearly incapable of delivering any quality of life? Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.

My personal example or experience: I would love to live in SF or in Alameda county. My employer statewide pays same salary to everybody with same title, with SF county (not Alameda) getting extra $260 per month, whereas rental differece is like $1000 for studio in non-Alameda & $2500 in SF.

Many of my colleagues can still afford to live in SF because they have their parent's homes or something in that area, and thus pay no rent, or have way lower expenses in housing.

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

#774

Post by _jab » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #144

The number of homeless people in California grew about 50% between 2014 and 2022. The state, which accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless, an estimated 115,000 people More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high percentage of the chronically homeless who likely skew those stats pretty badly. My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just th…

There's probably some truth to the idea that other places have exported their homelessness problems to San Francisco, but I think you're overblowing it here. Homelessness is a really complicated problem that I doubt has simple causes and solutions.

I do however agree that this is a national issue. I think places like New York and Boston are likely to see significantly worse homelessness themselves over the next decade.

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

#775

Post by relaxing » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:47 AM UTC

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #583

dv_dt wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of worrying about who gets what for free before actually solving the problem, is a major blocker in solving the homelessness problem. And not only do the homeless suffer for it, the people who have work or homes in the area suffer for the lack of pragmatism about it.

If you offer free housing, there will be millions claiming they are homeless to take advantage. Just look at the PPP loans that were taken advantage of during the pandemic to get an idea how far people will go to get a bit of free cash.

No one chooses to live in housing projects if they have better options.

Honestly, there are so many arguments around public housing, you could at least pick one that makes sense.

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

#776

Post by xp84 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:49 AM UTC

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…

SF's attempts at "fixing" housing always amount to this lottery system.

Rent control: A random windfall for whatever tenant snags these coveted apartments when someone dies in a 3 bedroom apartment they haven't needed in 30 years but "can't afford" to downsize from since they have been paying $650 since 1989. Also the illegal subletters who are numerous and shameless, from personal experience.

Low-income housing minimums: A random windfall for a few lucky lottery winners, while everyone else from indigent to middle-class has to struggle because the developers need to build only luxury housing to make up for eating the cost of the low income housing.

And then this housing first thing is more of the same.

> siphoned off into these non-profits

Indeed. The homeless-industrial complex of nonprofits in SF is huge, but popular since it is a jobs program for all the people with social science bachelors and masters degrees, and no marketable skills.

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

#777

Post by moomoo11 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

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…

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 left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.

Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.

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

#778

Post by dmix » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:56 AM UTC

el_nahual wrote: post #667

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 can tell you about the experience with "housing first" approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here. There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares. In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing . Why? Because the one condit…

A lot of full-on junkies will essentially trade their public housing apartments to dealers who use it as as safe spot to deal out crack/heroin. The dealers don't operate our of their own house for safety so they hire junkies and use their places as distribution centers in exchange for 'free' drugs, while still letting them sleep in their bedrooms.

Then the apartments eventually turn into crack dens. Eventually the door gets kicked in by police and the dealers find another person willing to exchange free drugs to let them use their place. Plus the junkies going in/out of jail and their apartment gets used when they aren't there.

This sort of thing puts a ton of pressure on the normal families trying to live in those apartment buildings. A small group can definitely ruin entire floors of those apartments.

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

#779

Post by 35997279 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:57 AM UTC

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…

The other hesitation with “housing first” is that it’s associated with housing projects, aka ghettos. I’ve seen The Wire (2002-2008). Is what they’re going to build for the homeless going to be like that? Is it going to be where my kids play? Is it going to be where I walk my dog at night?

It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

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

#780

Post by _8j50 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 12:59 AM UTC

My disagreement with "housing first" is that the state should provide housing indirectly by building regular housing and bringing home prices down along with price regulation and redeveloping urban areas with apartments and condos.

I.e.: the housing market is thr problem in cali, not people being homeless (that is just one symptom).