Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
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Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#2"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."
Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#3The crux of the matter:
The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street.
I believe similar observations have been made in subsidizing the price of fruit and vegetables (or even bikes and gym memberships) vs the medical costs of bad diets and lack of exercise, too.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#4The crux of the matter: The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. I believe similar observations have bee…
Especially as meat is subsidized so heavily.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#5The crux of the matter: The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. I believe similar observations have bee…
This guy and I'm sure a lot of others could be pretty well off if there was some type of rural co-op they could live and work on. It could save a lot of money and probably help these people a lot by getting them out of the city.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#6"Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis."
This is exactly why programs like these won't take off. It's hard to present this kind of complex analysis of the behavior of a system to the tax payers for exactly this reason. The average person probably votes their conscience, not what makes the most sense from scientific studies, which are generally not widely published anyway. There's no simple moral argument to be made for giving homeless people free apartments that they don't deserve, and most voters won't think through a proof that has more than like two steps.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#7The crux of the matter: The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. I believe similar observations have bee…
This guy and I'm sure a lot of others could be pretty well off if there was some type of rural co-op they could live and work on. It could save a lot of money and probably help these people a lot by getting them out of the city.
A lot of homeless people cannot, or will not, live in such a situation. There are so many well-meaning people trying to help the homeless that those who stay homeless generally have a compelling reason why they are. Either they're episodically violent which makes them unsafe to house with other homeless people, or they've simply adapted to the vagrant lifestyle and don't know any other. Makes the problem much tougher to solve.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#8The crux of the matter: The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. I believe similar observations have bee…
It's not as simple as just throwing money at the problem and managing things differently.
I've been homeless before and it's not pretty, a lot of the people who I met on the street during that time would not have been able to just take an apartment and that would be their problem solved.
They are on the street for a reason and if the reason was purely financial then perhaps the apartment would help, but a lot of the time the reasons can be associated to mental health, poverty, drugs, alcoholism... and giving someone an apartment in those cases is unlikely to add anything to the solution.
What those people need is real support and care. And an apartment will just isolate them and risks exacerbating the problems for them.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#9"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it." Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.
I remember a homeless called Lounis (after my studies, I joined Paris Firefighter Brigade), we collected him regularly because people would complain he was staying at their frontdoor. On our way to the hospital, he would sing with us in the truck, he would even do air guitar. The day some of my colleagues came back to the fire station after they collected his body on the street, we all felt like the police officers did for Murray.
Re: Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
#10The Delancey Street Foundation is an organization that has recuperated thousands of people who have hit rock bottom. And they do it without any government funding (they're self-supporting). One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship out there.
http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/
And if you're interested in the details of how the organization operates, I did some research and wrote about the organization on my blog:
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-...