While that's a fine aim, in reality it just means "do nothing". There are much more achievable short-term things that can be done to ease homelessness in SF than solving the decades-long problem of affordable housing.
There is a subtle but important difference between solving the problem of "outrageous housing" and "affordable housing".
The difference can be illustrated by looking at how a measure meant to solve the latter, creates the former.
Suppose that we mandate that all housing created needs to be reviewed and a certain fraction of that housing needs to be set aside for affordable housing. You will indeed increase the amount of housing available at the price point that you have deemed affordable.
However the same action is a disincentive to build new housing, and also artificially reduces the supply of housing being sold at what would otherwise be a fair market price. This measure restricts supply, and in accord with economics 101 will increase average prices.
The result? More affordable housing AND a higher average price of housing. The net cost of housing goes up. (Which ironically will tend to cause more people who were on the edge of being able to afford housing to become homeless, making it likely that they lose their jobs, and thereby creating more need for affordable housing. Aren't you glad that we're doing something about the affordable housing problem to help them?)
Physical illness and drug addiction (and even mental illness in some cases) are more likely a symptom of homelessness than a cause.
From accounts I've heard from homeless people, one of the biggest problems homeless people have is boredom. This leads to both depression and drug use, both of which can lead to both physical and mental illness.
In fairness to all in this thread, I think the failure to define "solving homelessness" is causing some miscommunication.
The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem.
The GP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in terms of the existing homeless population, which, regardless of causation or the directionality of any causation, does require dealing with the mental illness and drug abuse issues.
> The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem.
IMO, it's not, because people don't become homeless (for the most part) because there are no existing vacant housing units, they become homeless because of joblessness, poor credit, drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal issues (often involving drugs), or a combination thereof, which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
No, those are largely myths and where they are true are in places without large homeless populations. We are talking about homelessness in San Francisco which is primarily caused by zoning issues, gentrification, and similar issues.
> ... which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
This is made easier when there is more housing available.
Part of the problem for SF is that a critical part of “solving” homelessness is actually having homes. But a very large group of people (that I cynically suspect overlaps a lot of the pro-prop C people) also fight the addition of apartment buildings. I saw numbers along the lines of 5400 homeless people in SF a long time ago, but even if that number were the same now, that means you need to add enough buildings to support 5400 bed rooms.
Basically there’s no way you can “fight homelessness” and “fight apartments/evil gentrifying landlords”, and actually expect to do anything about homelessness.
I live in SF, have for over a decade. I know several homeless people quite well. All of them keep getting kicked out of housing because of bad behavior that they just cannot help themselves from doing. They do not have the ability to live by themselves. They need supportive housing, and a path to get out of homelessness. None of the options today focuses on post-housing issues.
A lot are also alcoholics and/or addicts - this is one of those things where saving money is the short term (not managing the homelessness problem before it got to this point) results in a higher cost in the long term - now you not only have to manage homelessness, you also hav to help the existing homeless recover from long term homelessness.
You also have the long term costs of assisting those with mental illness (as a result of "saving money" by closing down all state level support for mental illness in the 80s - I'm not saying that was a panacea, but having the support helped a lot of people that currently get no help).
Politicians love "saving tax payer money" through short term things like this, because they know that by the time someone has to fix their mess they've moved on/retired and they don't have to deal with it.
That is a misrepresentation of a lot of pro Prop C people (probably most) who advocate for more affordable housing. What they fight for is higher affordable housing requirements, as they don’t see market rate development in tech boomtowns as a realistic way to solve affordability for the working class.[1]
Context for non-SF or non-SV people: Prop C is a proposal to increase the budget dedicated to help homeless people, by taxing gross receipts taxes for companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue.
Patrick's view is essentially that instead of adding taxes for such companies, which could potentially impact middle class workers, we should let the current SF mayor take care of this issue, being in favor of additional taxes to fund whatever initiative is considered valid.
Now, here's my view. I've been living in SF for six years, I know exactly one homeless (Charlie), I'm not an expert on poverty or homelessness, but let's say I've seen my fair share of bad things in the world to at least have an opinion.
We don't have exact data on how and why people become homeless. We know that (mostly) they're not born homeless, they become homeless.
I think we should work on the causes. But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc, you can pick a trusted, smart serial entrepreneur, give him a big budget ($100M), and ask him to discover the causes and try to solve it by measuring how far these $100M go.
For example, there's a longstanding rumor that the homeless are being "shipped from out of state" from places like Texas giving free bus tickets. Here's the messier statistics:
"Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they
most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more
years. Eight percent (8%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to the
survey findings in 2015.
Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported that they were living out of state at the time they
became homeless. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported they were living in another county in
California. California counties that respondents reported living in at the time they most recently
became homeless include Alameda County (5%), San Mateo (4%), Contra Costa (3%), Marin (3%),
Santa Clara County (1%), and some other California county (5%)."
Note that "at the time they most recently became homeless" is often a potentially misleading statistic. Commenters in the past have pointed out that metrics like this often count people being released from prison or jail and ending up on the streets as becoming homeless after being housed in the State. So if a homeless person gets bussed in from out of state, gets imprisoned, and subsequently gets released they're counted as having been living in California at the time they became homeless.
> Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless.
I am so tired of reading this bullshit "statistic". It is a self-reported number. If a homeless person thinks it benefits him to say so, he will. And homeless people will say anything to survive, as they are barely surviving.
If you came where from Podunk, MN and crashed on your buddy's couch last year before he kicked you out? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If you came here from somewhere else and stayed in a shelter for a day before you got evicted? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If the question was, "were you a rent-paying resident of SF before you became homeless", the answer would be totally different.
There are 76 non-profits that feed from the trough of homelessness[1]. Don't they have admin overhead? How much money is wasted on this overhead?
In a country with open borders between states and extremely cheap transportation, homelessness really should be thought of as, at least partially, a federal problem. And funded accordingly.
i laughed when I read that title. "Tracking results" is definitely a form of overhead, so the article is literally complaining that charities are ineffective because they don't have enough overhead.
In general, "minimize overhead" isn't equal to "maximize impact per dollar". The obvious software industry exemplar is the oft-repeated complaint about companies hiring expensive engineers and then refusing to buy a $200 monitor.
The commerce cause is mostly orthogonal (not irrelevant, but orthogonal) to no-strings-attached social services funding, even under very literal/originalist interpretations.
To be fair, "Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more years" is much harder to game, though just as easy to lie about.
I'm more worried about this thought in the article:
> While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen.
It's not a surprise that the city with more spending on services for the homeless has more homeless. That's exactly what you'd expect under pretty much any model.
Do you believe that subsidizing the homeless means you'll get more homeless? Then higher spending will directly cause more homelessness.
Do you believe that places with bigger problems will try harder to do something about them? Then higher spending will reflect more homelessness.
Excellent report, thanks for the link. It is quite readable and easy to understand. Can also see recent 3-year trends on most graphs.
I found the section on primary cause of homelessness interesting:
---
22% of respondents reported job loss as the primary cause of their homelessness.
15% reported drugs or alcohol.
13% reported an argument with a friend or family member who asked them to leave
12% reported eviction
10% reported divorce or separation
7% reported an illness or medical problem.
---
I suspect mental health is something that is very pertinent. I used to volunteer with the homeless and drug addiction seemed like was used for self-medication. Quite a few people were suffering from anxiety, schizophrenia and other issues that prevented them to forming meaningful relationships, holding a job, staying in touch with their family (who often have disowned them).
> But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc,
The recommended statement by Wiener addresses this: "A broad-based stakeholder group — including Mayor Ed Lee, then-Supervisor David Chiu, the Controller, the business community, labor, and social service nonprofits..."
Watching Bill Gates try to solve problems in education [1] was a real wake-up call for me. I had a rather involved conversation when the initiative was first announced with an education leader who was deeply suspicious and expected failure (and, what's more, for exactly the reasons that the RAND report identified).
It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.
And perhaps more importantly, that more money isn't always a "no downsides" proposition. Big spends on the wrong ideas can suck the air out of the room and divert other resources away from more promising ideas.
But I suspect that the people whose names you mentioned already know that the most effective ideas are probably going to come, in part, from people who have put in their 10,000 hours working on actually solving homelessness.
In short, you have to be very careful when you work on hard problems not to divert resources away from other approaches... that might be even more valuable.
> It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.
I often cringe when I see non-education folks trying to tackle the problem of education in classroms by "automating" or pushing video courses. Solving the issue of education is far more than what's IN the classroom (Here in Jersey we had Abbot districts which gave more to low income schools, it's failed). While supplies are a big problem, more is to do with environment. Having done teaching in a low income district (every single prospective teacher should do this) and an upper middle-class district the difference was stark. I had kids in 1st grade who could not even tie shoes or zipper jackets, let alone have a pencil.
> If homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved. While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen.
This is all you need to know. We should starve the beast, and then the city will actually do something about the homeless problem.
"San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles"
Anyone know why this discrepancy exists?
I know this includes rental assistance for those "at risk" of becoming homeless (but not necessarily homeless), so the value, when calculated "per homeless" resident, is meaningless.
However, this calculation "per city resident" in general seems to point at some deep infrastructural issues. I'm trying to find an analysis as to why and coming up empty.
Prima facie this strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. New York and Los Angeles are large cities with millions of residents and dominate their geographical areas (LA perhaps less than New York, but still). San Francisco has something like 884,000 residents, which makes it the second largest city in the Bay Area (after San Jose, with 1,035,000 or so), which has something like 8.7 million residents if you go by Combined Statistical Area (CSA) definition, which makes intuitive sense to me having lived here. By comparison New York has 8.6 million out of 24 million for its CSA; LA has 4 million out of 18.7 million for its CSA.
So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.
AFAIK, homeless problem scales with population size. So if you divide by population size (which those values do), the value should stay roughly the same.
Yep, there are plenty of outlying areas in LA that are still not expensive in the same way SF is - LA is just much, much bigger. So you can hang on with significantly less money. Still, it's an interesting question.
Because it's a disingenuous compare. Stripe is leading you to believe that spending per city resident is a fair measure of the effectiveness of how we spend money. But it's actually spending per homeless city resident that's the correct measure of that!
SF has a much higher rate of homelessness than the national average, so that explodes the per-resident cost. But we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Surprised?
Stripe knows all this. They have this veneer of plain spoken honesty, but take note of the trick they're trying to pull here.
What about the argument that some places are more expensive than others, and sometimes, for a few years, it makes more sense to live in a cheap place while you set up your finances, and then make decisions about where to live for the long term?
Fair - I think the solution then also would not be more money directly to them, but a better support system for the mentally challenged. If they can't make rational decisions as you say, then (assuming we can agree that compassion is good) we should provide better systems to help.
Things sound very difficult out west. Rent can be had for under $500 in many southeastern cities. That being said, most of the newish industrial jobs are out in rural areas. Although Doreen Michele seems to be referencing online jobs, so I may be missing the context.
We need to first make sure we're all talking about the same problem. When people complain about the homeless of San Francisco it is not the people Doreen is taking about.
The people in question are severely mentally ill, addicts, likely both. They are the people that shoot heroin at the bus stop you are trying to wait at, they're the guy with no shoes, covered in his own waste screaming at passers-by. These are the people that are causing the frustration, not people who could make it if they could level up their skillset and get a better job.
We really need to agree on the issue at hand because so often I see people talk straight past each other. The man covered in his waste needs help, desperately, he will not be someone who with a little help starts paying rent and holding down a job. He needs the community to pay for housing, medical treatment, and psychiatric care for a long time, likely forever to some degree. But we can't keep talking about different problems.
No amount of money can circumvent the pidgeonhole principle. If the city wants to house all it's residents, then it needs to start by building more housing. Sure, some homeless need extra services, but if there aren't enough units the whole effort is moot.
This solution doesn't take into account basic supply & demand though.
There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket.
Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.
The solution isn't too just give away housing for free, it's too remove government obstruction of housing construction and let the market correct itself.
Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.
The reports I remember from years ago (circa 2010 or 2012, forget the exact year) were that the city wants to build Treasure Island up to support about 30K people, give or take. The renderings were pretty cool, till you consider the stability of the ground in an earthquake, the radioactive waste and rising sea levels.
This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved.
Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions?
When you want to knock down a one-story building to put 75 apartments next to a train station, the city shouldn't waste four years on stuff like "maybe that laundromat is historically significant?"
Height restrictions are a big one, as is reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reject housing construction. Plenty of groups, like Calle 24, use this in an extortionary manner and block housing unless the developer makes donations to the group or its affiliates.
You and I would probably agree right off the bat on reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reduce housing construction.
However, I have to ask you about height restrictions. There's height restrictions because not everyone wants to live next to a skyscraper, which is well, debatable. I can debate both sides of that.
There's also height restrictions because the bedrock of San Francisco is not uniform across the city. In many areas of the city, I don't think you even can build skyscrapers and expect them to remain stable, as we are seeing with the Millennium Tower and the incomplete dome on the Salesforce Tower.
I could consider reducing height restrictions, certainly, but I don't think you can eliminate them completely.
I think rent control a is a big reason why this attitude exists. A large segment of rents (~70% of them) live in rent controlled units, and thus have no direct incentive to lower rents. In practice, most people probably wouldn't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars extra per month for a better view. But in SF, residents are shielded from that sort of tradeoff by rent control, and the costs of obstructing development are passed off to other people. If residents actually felt the impact of rising rents, the discussion around development would be a very different story.
In cities without rent control, like Seattle, development happens a lot quicker. Over the course of half a decade (2010-2015 IIRC) Seattle added more than twice the number of housing units as SF. Rent control's perverse system of incentives leads cities like SF to shoot themselves in the foot.
Wouldn't it be much cheaper to bus them to a place that doesn't cost much to live?
You probably could make a real nice camp on some dirt cheap woodland for 200 million.
Stack shipping containers 3 high, have one person live in each and have a shower block for every 15-30 residents. Cook cheap in large badges, get some teach for america out there to help them learn to read and write, require each person to spend a certain amount of hours working in exchange for food and housing...
The city wants to enable all of its homeless to escape homelessness.
It probably doesn't particularly want to house all of them, either directly (that is, the city itself) provides housing, or even have them housed within the geographic boundaries of the city. Having them acheive stable housing outside of the city would be just as much of a win.
It's honestly insane to try and solve homelessness in San Francisco because practically none of the people that are homeless in San Francisco have any chance of realistically living in San Francisco long term when even young college-educated people who have their lives together struggle to eke out a living here.
The best thing that could be done with all this money is to spend it on providing support in other towns and cities where the cost of living is much better and the homeless people being helped have an actual chance to get back on their own two feet and support themselves.
Trying to support homeless people in the city with the most expensive cost of living in the world is counterproductive and condemns any homeless people supported here to a lifetime of support.
Furthermore, the money would go a lot further in other places since the cost of living would be lower and you could pay to have more social workers per homeless person.
I agree - it seems like nobody is really thinking through how to solve homelessness and is instead arguing about how much money should be allocated to the same strategy that cannot work.
For currently homeless people with no “special deal” like winning the affordable housing lottery, it’s just going to be implausible for them to find housing in San Francisco, as long as someone earning $30,000 a year can’t afford to live in San Francisco. That means any solution must get people into housing that is not located in San Francisco.
Problem is, anywhere you go, you'll run into the local NIMBYs.
Or let's say San Francisco actually subsidizes some town out in Central Valley, I dunno, Hughson for the sake of argument, buys up loads of farm land adjacent to the town and turns it into a much nicer place to live because those dollars will go further, puts in some groceries, parks, a whole community basically. You've now turned Hughson into a much nicer town, and it will attract more people wanting to live there, and you're still subsidizing a whole other city in the process increasing the cost of living. Not to mention moving our entire homeless population there would effectively double the size of Hughson straining local resources and utilities, so probably a lawsuit and more money to subsidize it further.
So now you've done all of that, but since this is Hughson, there's no jobs except farm work, and the locals probably have that covered so now they need good transportation to the nearest decently large city (Modesto and Turlock) to find some jobs. Now that you've got this satellite city, how does it sustain itself? Because at some point, San Francisco taxpayers are going to start asking themselves, why are we subsidizing Hughson? Assuming you got them to agree to it in the first place (which you won't). City charter amendment hits the ballot, it probably passes, but the wording is so poor it has negative knock-on effects for all the other land the city owns outside of the county line (the Airport and Hetch Hetchy mainly), Hughson and Stanislaus County are left holding the bag on a largely unproductive neighborhood that is a drain on the local coffers and almost completely dependent on subsidies from people richer than them.
I'm sure by this point they'll be real excited about bulldozing some houses to make way for some bullet trains they were previously gung-ho about stopping at all costs, and depending on the legal status of the property left behind, they can either seize them because nobody is paying property taxes, or seize them with eminent domain and put them towards some new productive purpose that once again, leaves these formerly homeless people homeless.
This is still better than the alternatives: hoping the State of California steps in to do something about it (they won't because nobody in California likes San Francisco except people who live in San Francisco), or hoping the Feds step in (they won't because hating San Francisco and hoping it falls into the ocean is a national past time, as American as liking Baseball).
tl;dr we spend money trying to "solve" the "problem" locally despite the high cost of living because San Francisco only has San Francisco to depend on. Anybody in power that claims to like San Francisco doesn't actually like San Francisco, they just love our money.
Support systems for economic relocation feels like the right answer in theory. Living in SF proper is like filet mignon. Yes everyone needs shelter but not in expensive zip code. In order to actually reduce homelessness you probably need relocation opportunities + friction to stay. I can’t imagine working on either front so here we are.
The data is incredibly detailed, absolutely fascinating and messy as you'd expect, dispelling a lot of the overly simplistic rumors like other states "shipping" SF homeless people, homeless people all being one type of person or another etc etc etc
Glad to see this report being referenced. A friend and I volunteered to gather this data at the beginning of 2017 along with hundreds of other volunteers. It's an interesting process. You show up, they assign you specific streets to walk and you just count up homeless people, noting their sex, rough age, and dwelling type (improvised structure, vehicle, etc.).
I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).
The survey includes a "primary cause of homelessness" section, of which loss of job forms a very weak plurality.
The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly.
¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.
This is a very in depth report but unfortunately it is on data that is from Jan 2017, before when we started seeing the huge homeless encampments forming all over the place (I have lived in Oakland for 25 years, so only really know about changes there). It shows that the number of homeless people in SF has been about the same since 2013, so I'm not sure it is worth reading the 80 pages to try understand what has changed to make homelessness a much bigger problem recently.
2013=7,350
2015=7,539
2017=7,449
Too bad they don't do it every year. Another survey is due in Jan 2019, and maybe it can help us understand this new level of homelessness going on.
Glad to hear something will happen in collaboration with the Mayor's office, at some point in the future. Until that point, pass Prop C and propose a repeal whenever you all come up with the plan that's so much better.
Is homelessness in SF really about affordable housing? Obviously San Francisco has insane housing prices but there are dozens and dozens of shelters & programs (I volunteer at a couple) for homeless people to take refuge and get their life back together.
As I understand it (and as my friend who is an SF police officer where 90% of his job is dealing with the homeless), the much larger problem is SF's (& perhaps society in general's) failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities.
No amount of money, support systems, or opportunity for getting off the street is going to help people with severe schizophrenia or dementia who have no family or safety net. A lot of these people the only solution is for them to be institutionalized. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a way for someone to be institutionalized against their will (unless they are causing danger of harm to themselves or others) so they continue to live on the streets.
I think what this city really needs is a place to send people deemed in need of institutionalizing, and the ability for that to be determined. Of course that would never fly in a place like SF, but I think it would be a happier life for those people than life on the streets.
Being born in 1991 I didn't realize this until recently but apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
Simply shutting them down probably wasn't the best solution, but those institutions were generally more geared towards locking people away than recover & treatment.
> apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
There are two explanations, idealistic and cynical; I'll let you decide what percentage of accuracy applies to each (neither were 0% or 100%).
The idealistic justification was that the institutional option was pretty grim (think "one flew over the cuckoo's nest") and that many of those patients would do better at home or in halfway houses.
The cynical explanation was that this was at the beginning of the huge anti-tax / anti-government wave that began with Reagan's election and continues today: closing the institutions cut government expenditure.
One problem is that we don't really "commit" people the same way as we did decades ago. It's a lot harder to just declare someone unfit and lock them in an institution - and for good reason, but the unfortunate result is that mental institutions no longer serve the same function of cloistering these people away from the rest of society.
The reaction to unacceptable conditions was correct and justifiable, but we've thrown the baby with the bathwater in the sense that now, mentally handicapped people are homeless all over the place...
this is something i think about a lot, as one of my best friends from high school developed severe schizophrenia in his early twenties and has been living on the streets for several years now. his parents have plenty of money and would be willing to pay for pretty much any treatment program, but he completely refuses to try at all. they've had him involuntarily committed several times now, but he just walks out as soon as possible every time. the doctors say there is still a possibility of managing his condition, but that the time window is closing.
on the one hand, it's really frustrating because it seems like his life could be greatly improved if he could be forced to undergo long term treatment. he might even be grateful on the other side. but on the other hand, living in a putatively free society, is there a point where you just have to take someone at their word that they don't want to do something? he doesn't seem to be hurting anyone but himself, and he claims to be happy.
Depending upon the state a few ounces of weed could get him locked away for far longer than it would take to get his mental illness under control. That to me starkly calls out the hypocrisy.
There would probably be a person on the other side who would be grateful, but it's far from obvious that that would be the same person as the one you forced into long term treatment. It's a good thing that our society makes it this hard to involuntarily commit people, and as cco mentions, it would be nice if we could extend this to other kinds of forcible confinement.
There is actually a severe shortage of shelter beds in San Francisco.
You are right that mental health is a consideration, but the bigger problem is both simpler and easier to fix: the number of shelter beds (and other forms of supportive housing - including long-term housing) has decreased since 2004 and is woefully inadequate for the number of current homeless.
> the much larger problem is SF's... failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities
You can debunk this with a simple observation: Homelessness has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?
The bigger problem here is Stripe's argument is misleading. They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident, when SF actually has a higher rate of homelessness than other cities. We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Totally invalidates their argument that "if it's just a question of money this issue would already be solved."
> Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?
No, but protocols for involuntary commitment of people with borderline states may have.
> They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident
It is pretty easy to derive one from the other, given homelessness levels, and given as SF is has one of the highest ones (slightly lower only than NYC) the conclusion seems to stay - expense level is very high.
> We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC
> given homelessness levels, and given as SF is has one of the highest ones (slightly lower only than NYC) the conclusion seems to stay - expense level is very high.
That doesn’t follow at all. NYC spends 10x what SF does on homelessness. SF spends $3.8K [1] on each homeless person while NYC is around 10x that. [2]
There's a trick there. They remove all administrative costs, all prevention costs, all money that are spent by all government except for one specific department, and then declare that's "real" spending. As if all the other money is not spent, towards the same goal. And, I suppose, they compare it to full spending in NYC (not sure since the second article is paywalled). But whatever happens in NYC, counting only net spending on shelters makes no sense - the money spent on all programs in that area, including of course their admin costs, should be counted. If admin costs or non-direct spending is too high and not important for solving the problems of the homeless, if should be changed, not just ignored. If only 22% of the budget reaches the homeless, then maybe we should advocate first not for raising taxes, but for figuring out why the other 78% do not.
Then there's another trick - the money which were strictly defined to help only current homeless (so if the program worked for somebody and she is no longer homeless, or is prevented from being homeless by the program spending, that money not counted) and then divided by the number of people who has been homeless at any point, including those that aren't homeless now. The yearly figure is divided by cumulative number, not by average at certain moment. That's like dividing number of seats in the class not by number of students in each class at the same time, but by number of students that will use that room over a year, and arriving to conclusion that school classes have 0.1 seat per pupil and we need 10x seats.
Between 2006 and 2008 I spent a lot of time on the streets interviewing homeless people for a documentary film I was making [1]. One of the things they often mentioned was the "homeless-industrial complex" (a phrase coined by one of my subjects, not me). There are a lot of organizations that make a lot of money "helping" homeless people, and their continued existence depends on there not being an effective solution to the problem. Homeless people are literally their bread-and-butter, so they have a perverse incentive to ensure a steady supply of "product". Similar perverse incentives play themselves out in other areas of our society, like privately run prisons.
Providing your own documentary with its editorial biases as a citation to back your own statements is not credible, especially when it makes such strong claims of bad faith among organizations working to alleviate homelessness.
Can you provide independent citations that back your claims about the existence of a "homeless-industrial complex"?
User23 very kindly provided a heap of references in a sibling comment, but just for the record: I did not intend to claim that the HIC exists, only that my subjects talked about it, and it seems like a plausible hypothesis to me.
I asked a friend who works for a government agency what that agency does. He replied by saying that like any good bureaucracy, it's first just was to perpetuate itself. I found that both sad and amusing.
Gross receipts taxes are poorly structured taxes. Because they tax all business transactions throughout the supply chain, they create a pyramiding effect that penalizes more complex industries, e.g., an aircraft manufacturer probably gets taxed more than a local dairy. I don't know whether the things the SF government wants to spend the money on will help with the homelessness problem or not; but I do think there are better types of taxes to raise that money.
My distant observation is that the high risk mindset that allows companies like Stripe and many others in your area to succeed is the same that brings people to the streets. I imagine many successful founders are homeless in many parallel universes.
> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood
Swap 'Prop C' for any other cause, and 'the homeless' for any other intended benefactor of it, and you get a good formula for how to strip all the nuance out of a debate and turn it into a battle between opposing sides.
I don't have an opinion on Stripe's position here but that sentence itself is a pretty eloquent summary for how dumb modern discussion has become in many circles.
> Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress.
That's how they roll.
> See "right-to-work" laws
I'm guessing you've confused right-to-work with at-will employment. Right-to-work laws mean that a union can't force you to join and pay dues. "At-will employment" means you can be fired for any reason or no reason (except if the reason is they're a member of a "protected class")
I completely agree with Stripe here. The homeless problem will not be solved by increasing taxes. The problem is whether the money is being used correctly. I see huge issues with that. The department of homelessness currently has an annual budget of $250Million[1] for providing shelter to homeless. I wonder if govt. is spending $250 Million every year on providing them shelter why are they still living in streets? Where is all that money going?
So google tells me there’s around 7,000 homeless in SF. Let’s up that to 10,000. That’s $25,000 per homeless person per year. Am I missing something or is something very seriously wrong here?
That is the average cost? How much would that be if we looked only at the min-sec cost?
If it is anything like the institutional system, the people who need dedicated watchers 24/7 are so, so much more expensive that person like my family member, who needs only occasional help managing his normal life and doesn't need anybody to guard him.
While I'm certain SF could be doing a much better job with their existing budget, that's not a very meaningful statistic. You'd need to know how many more people would be homeless in the counterfactual scenario where they weren't spending that money.
Yes, you’re missing something: Much of the funding goes into prevention. SF only directly spends about $3K per homeless person. There are a lot more people staying housed because of those funds.
I read a tweet from Jack Dorsey that said Square would end up paying a significantly more than Salesforce (Link: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312149815091200). Why is that? Is it because financial services/payment transaction type businesses are taxed more or because this is a tax on "gross receipts" which potentially impacts these payment companies more because it includes income from interest, which they presumably have relatively more of? Or something else?
On a flip side, in developing countries, there aren't that many homelesses because, sadly, we don't think about them as equal.
They wouldn't be allowed to hang out along the streets like what happens in US. They will get picked up and will be forced to move and etc. We usually have a place called Slum for extremely poor people. They will need to make a living themselves. If they don't, I'm not sure where they end up (death, maybe).
> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood. While well-intentioned, it is San Francisco’s largest-ever tax increase, and comes with no systemic changes or effective accountability.
In San Francisco, you must be numb to that kind of logical fallacy by now. This sounds like 95% of all entreaties to spend more government money.
"Today, the world is pulling us towards polarized discourse and emotionally-charged, soundbite analysis. We’re all familiar with the forces at play. We think this is important to resist." - PC for President!
On a serious note there seems to be many sub issues like PC mentioned. On the top of my head:
1 - lack of homes
2 - speed of population migration is higher than planned
3 - increase in price of property is higher than planned
4 - increase in labor cost
5 - fund mismatch between different localities
etc
6 - funding changes from Fed
and from the Mayor's article there seem to be a lot more. The issue needs a Product like approach of finding all the requirements and fighting it from different directions. Adding funding would certainly help temporarily but not a good long term solution.
162 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadThe difference can be illustrated by looking at how a measure meant to solve the latter, creates the former.
Suppose that we mandate that all housing created needs to be reviewed and a certain fraction of that housing needs to be set aside for affordable housing. You will indeed increase the amount of housing available at the price point that you have deemed affordable.
However the same action is a disincentive to build new housing, and also artificially reduces the supply of housing being sold at what would otherwise be a fair market price. This measure restricts supply, and in accord with economics 101 will increase average prices.
The result? More affordable housing AND a higher average price of housing. The net cost of housing goes up. (Which ironically will tend to cause more people who were on the edge of being able to afford housing to become homeless, making it likely that they lose their jobs, and thereby creating more need for affordable housing. Aren't you glad that we're doing something about the affordable housing problem to help them?)
(I live a few blocks from the worst areas and see people dealing drugs and shooting up every day)
Being physically ill isn't a correlation of having neither money nor a home. /s
Being addicted to drugs isn't a symptom of mentally checking out to avoid the problems you're literally unable to address. /s
Edit: yes, you're right, it's a lot more complicated than just housing. But housing, I think, is a big cause.
Physical illness and drug addiction (and even mental illness in some cases) are more likely a symptom of homelessness than a cause.
From accounts I've heard from homeless people, one of the biggest problems homeless people have is boredom. This leads to both depression and drug use, both of which can lead to both physical and mental illness.
The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem.
The GP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in terms of the existing homeless population, which, regardless of causation or the directionality of any causation, does require dealing with the mental illness and drug abuse issues.
IMO, it's not, because people don't become homeless (for the most part) because there are no existing vacant housing units, they become homeless because of joblessness, poor credit, drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal issues (often involving drugs), or a combination thereof, which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
> ... which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
This is made easier when there is more housing available.
Basically there’s no way you can “fight homelessness” and “fight apartments/evil gentrifying landlords”, and actually expect to do anything about homelessness.
Although the people who fight housing seem to not grasp this.
A lot are also alcoholics and/or addicts - this is one of those things where saving money is the short term (not managing the homelessness problem before it got to this point) results in a higher cost in the long term - now you not only have to manage homelessness, you also hav to help the existing homeless recover from long term homelessness.
You also have the long term costs of assisting those with mental illness (as a result of "saving money" by closing down all state level support for mental illness in the 80s - I'm not saying that was a panacea, but having the support helped a lot of people that currently get no help).
Politicians love "saving tax payer money" through short term things like this, because they know that by the time someone has to fix their mess they've moved on/retired and they don't have to deal with it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...
Patrick's view is essentially that instead of adding taxes for such companies, which could potentially impact middle class workers, we should let the current SF mayor take care of this issue, being in favor of additional taxes to fund whatever initiative is considered valid.
Now, here's my view. I've been living in SF for six years, I know exactly one homeless (Charlie), I'm not an expert on poverty or homelessness, but let's say I've seen my fair share of bad things in the world to at least have an opinion.
We don't have exact data on how and why people become homeless. We know that (mostly) they're not born homeless, they become homeless.
I think we should work on the causes. But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc, you can pick a trusted, smart serial entrepreneur, give him a big budget ($100M), and ask him to discover the causes and try to solve it by measuring how far these $100M go.
For example, there's a longstanding rumor that the homeless are being "shipped from out of state" from places like Texas giving free bus tickets. Here's the messier statistics:
"Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Eight percent (8%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to the survey findings in 2015. Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported that they were living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported they were living in another county in California. California counties that respondents reported living in at the time they most recently became homeless include Alameda County (5%), San Mateo (4%), Contra Costa (3%), Marin (3%), Santa Clara County (1%), and some other California county (5%)."
learn more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+repor...
I am so tired of reading this bullshit "statistic". It is a self-reported number. If a homeless person thinks it benefits him to say so, he will. And homeless people will say anything to survive, as they are barely surviving.
If you came where from Podunk, MN and crashed on your buddy's couch last year before he kicked you out? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If you came here from somewhere else and stayed in a shelter for a day before you got evicted? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If the question was, "were you a rent-paying resident of SF before you became homeless", the answer would be totally different.
There are 76 non-profits that feed from the trough of homelessness[1]. Don't they have admin overhead? How much money is wasted on this overhead?
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...
> [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...
i laughed when I read that title. "Tracking results" is definitely a form of overhead, so the article is literally complaining that charities are ineffective because they don't have enough overhead.
In general, "minimize overhead" isn't equal to "maximize impact per dollar". The obvious software industry exemplar is the oft-repeated complaint about companies hiring expensive engineers and then refusing to buy a $200 monitor.
I'm more worried about this thought in the article:
> While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen.
It's not a surprise that the city with more spending on services for the homeless has more homeless. That's exactly what you'd expect under pretty much any model.
Do you believe that subsidizing the homeless means you'll get more homeless? Then higher spending will directly cause more homelessness.
Do you believe that places with bigger problems will try harder to do something about them? Then higher spending will reflect more homelessness.
I found the section on primary cause of homelessness interesting:
---
22% of respondents reported job loss as the primary cause of their homelessness.
15% reported drugs or alcohol.
13% reported an argument with a friend or family member who asked them to leave
12% reported eviction
10% reported divorce or separation
7% reported an illness or medical problem.
---
I suspect mental health is something that is very pertinent. I used to volunteer with the homeless and drug addiction seemed like was used for self-medication. Quite a few people were suffering from anxiety, schizophrenia and other issues that prevented them to forming meaningful relationships, holding a job, staying in touch with their family (who often have disowned them).
Further under the section of "Health" I found:
---
41% drug or alcohol abuse
39% psychiatric or emotional condition
31% chronic health problem
Then
29% reported Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
23% a physical disability
12% a traumatic brain injury
11% reported having an AIDS or HIV related illness
---
The recommended statement by Wiener addresses this: "A broad-based stakeholder group — including Mayor Ed Lee, then-Supervisor David Chiu, the Controller, the business community, labor, and social service nonprofits..."
Watching Bill Gates try to solve problems in education [1] was a real wake-up call for me. I had a rather involved conversation when the initiative was first announced with an education leader who was deeply suspicious and expected failure (and, what's more, for exactly the reasons that the RAND report identified).
It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.
And perhaps more importantly, that more money isn't always a "no downsides" proposition. Big spends on the wrong ideas can suck the air out of the room and divert other resources away from more promising ideas.
But I suspect that the people whose names you mentioned already know that the most effective ideas are probably going to come, in part, from people who have put in their 10,000 hours working on actually solving homelessness.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...
In short, you have to be very careful when you work on hard problems not to divert resources away from other approaches... that might be even more valuable.
I often cringe when I see non-education folks trying to tackle the problem of education in classroms by "automating" or pushing video courses. Solving the issue of education is far more than what's IN the classroom (Here in Jersey we had Abbot districts which gave more to low income schools, it's failed). While supplies are a big problem, more is to do with environment. Having done teaching in a low income district (every single prospective teacher should do this) and an upper middle-class district the difference was stark. I had kids in 1st grade who could not even tie shoes or zipper jackets, let alone have a pencil.
This is all you need to know. We should starve the beast, and then the city will actually do something about the homeless problem.
Anyone know why this discrepancy exists? I know this includes rental assistance for those "at risk" of becoming homeless (but not necessarily homeless), so the value, when calculated "per homeless" resident, is meaningless.
However, this calculation "per city resident" in general seems to point at some deep infrastructural issues. I'm trying to find an analysis as to why and coming up empty.
So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.
What are the factors that make this untrue?
SF vs. Manhattan is a better comparison as New York city as a whole has more/cheaper space available than SF.
SF has a much higher rate of homelessness than the national average, so that explodes the per-resident cost. But we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Surprised?
Stripe knows all this. They have this veneer of plain spoken honesty, but take note of the trick they're trying to pull here.
EDIT: I misinterpreted the thread: see comments below. Although Stripe's response was likely correlated to it.
"Companies like Square and Stripe would be taxed at a significantly larger total contribution than much larger companies like Salesforce."
It's Marc Benioff, from Salesforce, that has been calling both of them out.
The people in question are severely mentally ill, addicts, likely both. They are the people that shoot heroin at the bus stop you are trying to wait at, they're the guy with no shoes, covered in his own waste screaming at passers-by. These are the people that are causing the frustration, not people who could make it if they could level up their skillset and get a better job.
We really need to agree on the issue at hand because so often I see people talk straight past each other. The man covered in his waste needs help, desperately, he will not be someone who with a little help starts paying rent and holding down a job. He needs the community to pay for housing, medical treatment, and psychiatric care for a long time, likely forever to some degree. But we can't keep talking about different problems.
There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket.
Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.
So let me ask you, which government obstructions would you like to see removed?
Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.
This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved.
Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...
However, I have to ask you about height restrictions. There's height restrictions because not everyone wants to live next to a skyscraper, which is well, debatable. I can debate both sides of that.
There's also height restrictions because the bedrock of San Francisco is not uniform across the city. In many areas of the city, I don't think you even can build skyscrapers and expect them to remain stable, as we are seeing with the Millennium Tower and the incomplete dome on the Salesforce Tower.
I could consider reducing height restrictions, certainly, but I don't think you can eliminate them completely.
In cities without rent control, like Seattle, development happens a lot quicker. Over the course of half a decade (2010-2015 IIRC) Seattle added more than twice the number of housing units as SF. Rent control's perverse system of incentives leads cities like SF to shoot themselves in the foot.
You probably could make a real nice camp on some dirt cheap woodland for 200 million.
Stack shipping containers 3 high, have one person live in each and have a shower block for every 15-30 residents. Cook cheap in large badges, get some teach for america out there to help them learn to read and write, require each person to spend a certain amount of hours working in exchange for food and housing...
The city wants to enable all of its homeless to escape homelessness.
It probably doesn't particularly want to house all of them, either directly (that is, the city itself) provides housing, or even have them housed within the geographic boundaries of the city. Having them acheive stable housing outside of the city would be just as much of a win.
The best thing that could be done with all this money is to spend it on providing support in other towns and cities where the cost of living is much better and the homeless people being helped have an actual chance to get back on their own two feet and support themselves.
Trying to support homeless people in the city with the most expensive cost of living in the world is counterproductive and condemns any homeless people supported here to a lifetime of support.
Furthermore, the money would go a lot further in other places since the cost of living would be lower and you could pay to have more social workers per homeless person.
For currently homeless people with no “special deal” like winning the affordable housing lottery, it’s just going to be implausible for them to find housing in San Francisco, as long as someone earning $30,000 a year can’t afford to live in San Francisco. That means any solution must get people into housing that is not located in San Francisco.
Or let's say San Francisco actually subsidizes some town out in Central Valley, I dunno, Hughson for the sake of argument, buys up loads of farm land adjacent to the town and turns it into a much nicer place to live because those dollars will go further, puts in some groceries, parks, a whole community basically. You've now turned Hughson into a much nicer town, and it will attract more people wanting to live there, and you're still subsidizing a whole other city in the process increasing the cost of living. Not to mention moving our entire homeless population there would effectively double the size of Hughson straining local resources and utilities, so probably a lawsuit and more money to subsidize it further.
So now you've done all of that, but since this is Hughson, there's no jobs except farm work, and the locals probably have that covered so now they need good transportation to the nearest decently large city (Modesto and Turlock) to find some jobs. Now that you've got this satellite city, how does it sustain itself? Because at some point, San Francisco taxpayers are going to start asking themselves, why are we subsidizing Hughson? Assuming you got them to agree to it in the first place (which you won't). City charter amendment hits the ballot, it probably passes, but the wording is so poor it has negative knock-on effects for all the other land the city owns outside of the county line (the Airport and Hetch Hetchy mainly), Hughson and Stanislaus County are left holding the bag on a largely unproductive neighborhood that is a drain on the local coffers and almost completely dependent on subsidies from people richer than them.
I'm sure by this point they'll be real excited about bulldozing some houses to make way for some bullet trains they were previously gung-ho about stopping at all costs, and depending on the legal status of the property left behind, they can either seize them because nobody is paying property taxes, or seize them with eminent domain and put them towards some new productive purpose that once again, leaves these formerly homeless people homeless.
This is still better than the alternatives: hoping the State of California steps in to do something about it (they won't because nobody in California likes San Francisco except people who live in San Francisco), or hoping the Feds step in (they won't because hating San Francisco and hoping it falls into the ocean is a national past time, as American as liking Baseball).
tl;dr we spend money trying to "solve" the "problem" locally despite the high cost of living because San Francisco only has San Francisco to depend on. Anybody in power that claims to like San Francisco doesn't actually like San Francisco, they just love our money.
The data is incredibly detailed, absolutely fascinating and messy as you'd expect, dispelling a lot of the overly simplistic rumors like other states "shipping" SF homeless people, homeless people all being one type of person or another etc etc etc
I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).
The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly.
¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.
2013=7,350 2015=7,539 2017=7,449
Too bad they don't do it every year. Another survey is due in Jan 2019, and maybe it can help us understand this new level of homelessness going on.
As I understand it (and as my friend who is an SF police officer where 90% of his job is dealing with the homeless), the much larger problem is SF's (& perhaps society in general's) failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities.
No amount of money, support systems, or opportunity for getting off the street is going to help people with severe schizophrenia or dementia who have no family or safety net. A lot of these people the only solution is for them to be institutionalized. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a way for someone to be institutionalized against their will (unless they are causing danger of harm to themselves or others) so they continue to live on the streets.
I think what this city really needs is a place to send people deemed in need of institutionalizing, and the ability for that to be determined. Of course that would never fly in a place like SF, but I think it would be a happier life for those people than life on the streets.
There are two explanations, idealistic and cynical; I'll let you decide what percentage of accuracy applies to each (neither were 0% or 100%).
The idealistic justification was that the institutional option was pretty grim (think "one flew over the cuckoo's nest") and that many of those patients would do better at home or in halfway houses.
The cynical explanation was that this was at the beginning of the huge anti-tax / anti-government wave that began with Reagan's election and continues today: closing the institutions cut government expenditure.
https://www.thebalance.com/deinstitutionalization-3306067
Reagan and his failed economic policy.
> or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
The ongoing personality cult around Reagan and his failed economic policy.
The reaction to unacceptable conditions was correct and justifiable, but we've thrown the baby with the bathwater in the sense that now, mentally handicapped people are homeless all over the place...
on the one hand, it's really frustrating because it seems like his life could be greatly improved if he could be forced to undergo long term treatment. he might even be grateful on the other side. but on the other hand, living in a putatively free society, is there a point where you just have to take someone at their word that they don't want to do something? he doesn't seem to be hurting anyone but himself, and he claims to be happy.
There would probably be a person on the other side who would be grateful, but it's far from obvious that that would be the same person as the one you forced into long term treatment. It's a good thing that our society makes it this hard to involuntarily commit people, and as cco mentions, it would be nice if we could extend this to other kinds of forcible confinement.
You are right that mental health is a consideration, but the bigger problem is both simpler and easier to fix: the number of shelter beds (and other forms of supportive housing - including long-term housing) has decreased since 2004 and is woefully inadequate for the number of current homeless.
For more reading on this topic I recommend this detailed analysis: https://medium.com/@josefow/the-one-stat-that-explains-sfs-s... Also Mayor London Breed's analysis and approach: https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/a-bold-approach-to-homelessn...
You can debunk this with a simple observation: Homelessness has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?
The bigger problem here is Stripe's argument is misleading. They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident, when SF actually has a higher rate of homelessness than other cities. We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Totally invalidates their argument that "if it's just a question of money this issue would already be solved."
Maybe? Who's to say it has not?
No, but protocols for involuntary commitment of people with borderline states may have.
> They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident
It is pretty easy to derive one from the other, given homelessness levels, and given as SF is has one of the highest ones (slightly lower only than NYC) the conclusion seems to stay - expense level is very high.
> We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC
Source?
That doesn’t follow at all. NYC spends 10x what SF does on homelessness. SF spends $3.8K [1] on each homeless person while NYC is around 10x that. [2]
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-of-housing-homeless-in-she...
Then there's another trick - the money which were strictly defined to help only current homeless (so if the program worked for somebody and she is no longer homeless, or is prevented from being homeless by the program spending, that money not counted) and then divided by the number of people who has been homeless at any point, including those that aren't homeless now. The yearly figure is divided by cumulative number, not by average at certain moment. That's like dividing number of seats in the class not by number of students in each class at the same time, but by number of students that will use that room over a year, and arriving to conclusion that school classes have 0.1 seat per pupil and we need 10x seats.
[1] http://graceofgodmovie.com
Can you provide independent citations that back your claims about the existence of a "homeless-industrial complex"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-fran...
It's a drug and mental health issue, unless you are speaking to a broader philosophical point on what "high risk" means.
Swap 'Prop C' for any other cause, and 'the homeless' for any other intended benefactor of it, and you get a good formula for how to strip all the nuance out of a debate and turn it into a battle between opposing sides.
I don't have an opinion on Stripe's position here but that sentence itself is a pretty eloquent summary for how dumb modern discussion has become in many circles.
That's how they roll.
> See "right-to-work" laws
I'm guessing you've confused right-to-work with at-will employment. Right-to-work laws mean that a union can't force you to join and pay dues. "At-will employment" means you can be fired for any reason or no reason (except if the reason is they're a member of a "protected class")
[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...
http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/
https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
If it is anything like the institutional system, the people who need dedicated watchers 24/7 are so, so much more expensive that person like my family member, who needs only occasional help managing his normal life and doesn't need anybody to guard him.
They wouldn't be allowed to hang out along the streets like what happens in US. They will get picked up and will be forced to move and etc. We usually have a place called Slum for extremely poor people. They will need to make a living themselves. If they don't, I'm not sure where they end up (death, maybe).
Japan also doesn't think much about homeless people (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yaku...)
In San Francisco, you must be numb to that kind of logical fallacy by now. This sounds like 95% of all entreaties to spend more government money.