The article mentioned that San Jose has 6,000 homeless people and capacity for 1,000 homeless people (I assume this allows for food, beds etc but I'm not sure).
Perhaps I don't quite appreciate the complexity of this problem, but creating housing for 6,000 people seems pretty feasible and achievable. And really the city only needs to create space for 5,000 people since they already have 1,000 beds.
While a 1,000 to 6,000 capacity is a significant percentage growth, this just doesn't feel like an insurmountable problem. It seems like it should be pretty easy to resolve (building housing for these people) by a city government especially with a public private partnership and support from a major tech company.
Even if scaling 1,000 to 6,000 is hard, surely some incremental improvement (1,000 to 1,500 for example) should be possible
You make room for the 5,000...and word spreads and soon you have 10,000 more. Unfortunately with the homeless crisis we have the ones that try to support them more just end up with more of them. It's really a never ending battle...
Then make room for 5000 in every city, and do it with a federal program so individual cities don't have the incentive to cut back on it. Homelessness is a national problem and demands a national solution. The federal government has no problem creating trillions of dollars to prop up the financial system and fight endless wars. It can spare a few billion to get people off the streets and under roofs.
The cost will vary widely. SF currently spends $60K per tent in their encampment program...expand that to house 5K people and you run into problems.
Portland spent $58M on a jail built in the 90s that never opened and was then sold a few years back for just a few million (maybe 5 or 6 years ago). The owner said they would donate the site as a homeless shelter if the city ran it since they had a ballooning homeless problem (over 4K as of last count). City leaders felt that because it was formerly a jail and not near services that it would be inhumane to house homeless there. So instead they continue to sleep on the streets, get hit crossing the freeway and shitting on the sidewalks. It finally opened just before winter last year, but mostly because of NGO helping to get it running...the government is completely useless here. Total people currently off the street is only 45 since it still needs a lot of work.
NYC doesn't have the good weather that LA does. NYC also puts pretty strong limits on the people living in the shelters. There are a large portion of homeless that don't want to give up drugs, pets or other freedoms...so they prefer to just live in tents in nice weather.
How did we go from comparing NYC with SF to LA? None of your arguments around "good weather" applies to SF. I am struggling to see any insight in your comment that cannot be filed under "common myths people spread about homeless people."
The most obvious issue would be that the 6,000 figure in the article was pre-pandemic, so it might be much higher now.
Also, I don't know the economics of homelessness, but I feel like as supply of homeless shelters increased, demand for the beds would increase as well, right? How elastic is local demand, with people in RVs moving in/out of an area?
Not that it shouldn't be done, but it seems like if all it took to "solve" homelessness was building enough beds, we would already be doing that.
Perhaps I don't quite appreciate the complexity of this problem, but creating housing for 6,000 people seems pretty feasible and achievable.
No, you likely don't appreciate the complexity.
Homeless people are people. "Canned" solutions for 6000 people who have only one thing in common -- they are poor and living in X area -- tend to not work.
Across the entire nation, we do desperately need to figure out how to let the market provide housing that makes sense for people and is affordable. A large piece of that is removing barriers to market-based housing development and we tend to not focus on that.
That's fair, I only say 6,000 seems feasible since I'm in NYC which absolutely has a homeless issue as well, but there's capacity for 10s of thousands.
Of course, the current NYC capacity isn't enough for the number of homeless in NYC, but it's proof that housing and support for thousands of homeless people is possible by a city.
Providing shelter for homeless people without making them not homeless doesn't resolve the problem.
Homelessness is a symptom of deep issues in the US. We have broken housing policy. We have bad healthcare policy. We have saddled a lot of people with student loans under conditions where the loans are a huge burden and the education they got wasn't the slam dunk solution to making life work that we convinced them it would be.
Homelessness means "The lives of these people simply don't work for some reason." Lack of housing is one element of that, but it's not the entire issue.
We need to design an America where the lives of most ordinary people work again. Where you don't need a college degree or can get one without it being an undo burden. One where if you are willing to work and aren't a criminal etc, then it's possible to make your life work.
There's no single thing that will get us there, though fixing our broken housing policy such that affordable housing can exist again would be an important step forward.
Of course, but I think providing shelter, food, stability even in the short term is a necessary first step.
I know one issue a lot of homeless who are working to get back up on their feet face is even having a stable address to receive mail or include when applying to jobs etc.
I'm with you that there are many other issues and that homelessness is one symptom of a problem, but providing some stability through housing and food seems like a productive, and achievable first step for a city government to accomplish.
but providing some stability through housing and food seems like a productive, and achievable first step for a city government to accomplish.
The problem is how it's done.
I've eaten in soup kitchens. It tends to be lousy food and I was homeless because I have a serious medical condition and I eating healthy is critical to my ability to function at all.
A lot of homeless people have serious health issues and the attitude is "Beggars can't be choosers. Eat the free stuff that's been put in front of you." when sometimes that free stuff is actively harming their health and if you count the medical cost for requiring more medication and the opportunity cost in lost wages because they remain too sick to work, that "free meal" is an expensive as hell choice to make.
The longer I was on the street, the more I avoided things like soup kitchens, which not only tend to provide lousy food, they expose you to other people who are sick, coughing, haven't bathed recently, and are smoking either cigarettes or marijuana. I have a respiratory condition and am, additionally, allergic to marijuana. Soup kitchens were a nightmare.
What I think we ought to do is expand the food stamp program and lower the barriers to getting food stamps. Food stamps are put on a card, much like a debit card, and you spend it as you see fit and it gives you access to normal middle class food sources, like grocery stores.
Food is absolutely an essential and good quality food programs help protect the health of the people and mitigate the impacts of poverty, but many things aimed at "helping the homeless" are amazingly bad to the point of being mostly counterproductive in my first-hand experience as someone who was homeless for nearly 6 years. And when you are homeless, no one wants to hear your criticisms of this terrible program and how it doesn't actually meet your need. They expect you to be grateful while putting a gun to your head and saying "If you aren't eating at the awful soup kitchen, it's your own damn fault you can't solve your problems."
We really don't do a good job of helping America's poor access opportunity. This is no longer the land of opportunity and that's the crux of the problem.
If you can't already afford a new car and a big house, your life is likely slipping into the toilet rather than climbing towards a better future and it's incredibly hard to fight against the many trends pushing you down as just an individual being crushed under the boot of myriad larger forces.
I would like to see more mail services for the homeless generally, but the shelter system seems to be as bad as soup kitchens or worse and I never once spent the night in a homeless shelter.
Here in Reno they built an extensive homeless shelter with services. Every night there are empty beds and homeless people all over the city. I’m not entirely sure it’s as simple as “build them housing and they’ll get off the streets”. That said, if it is, then I’m all for it.
Interestingly, by law New York City must provide shelter to anyone in the city who is homeless, qualifies for relief and requests shelter. So it's not just that city government happens to be more supportive of its social services programs, there's an actual legal obligation to shelter everyone (and they can, and have been, sued if they don't meet that obligation).
Feasibility is not the problem. It's the lack of political will. Most cities will just ban or make life more difficult for the homeless than try to help people not become homeless in the first place. Once someone is homeless for a while, it's hard to help them because they develop mental health and substance abuse issues if they didn't already.
Feasibility is not the problem. It's the lack of political will.
I honestly and sincerely believe that most people simply don't know how to fix this and that is an underlying cause of the "lack of political will." It's why I research answers and have for a long time and write about it. I sincerely believe that if I can pinpoint the pain points and viable solutions, there will be people who will act on it and if they succeed, others will be happy to copy them.
Once someone is homeless for a while, it's hard to help them because they develop mental health and substance abuse issues if they didn't already.
I fully agree that being homeless is traumatic enough that it creates mental health issues. I feel like I have some kind of financial and social PTSD from nearly 6 years on the street.
But I think the perception that homeless people are all junkies is likely rooted in prejudice. It takes money to get high all the time. Serious drug users I've personally known had jobs, sometimes quite well-paid jobs.
You don't snort tons of cocaine by panhandling. I mostly saw evidence of alcohol and marijuana use by other homeless people. Granted, there are some hard core addicts who are homeless and that gets a lot of press, but the "face of the homeless" tends to be the most visibly homeless and problematic. The reality is there are homeless people with jobs, going to college, etc and doing all they can to not be discovered for fear of being fired, etc.
The way to solve homelessness is to help people generally make their lives work. Efforts designed to "help the homeless" tend to entrench the problem, in part because it posits help on first being homeless.
There are myriad issues that put one at risk of ending up homeless, such as disability, health issues and various other barriers to regular employment. Helping people with those issues, regardless of housing status or financial status, is a better way to reduce the incidence of homelessness overall.
If all it took was 6,000 extra housing units it would be great.
But the level of intervention required per homeless person is going to vary significantly. Some of them are just in a really precarious financial situation and that's "easy" to fix.
Some others are suffering from mental illness, addiction and chronic diseases. Having a roof over their heads will sure help fixing these issues, but it can't to it all.
San Francisco apparently was spending $60,000 per tent, not because the tents are expensive, but because they also have to provide services like showers, meals, and 24-hour security. [1]
I’m no expert, but this doesn’t sound much like normal housing or camping? It seems to be its own thing.
I'm glad they're trying to work on offering these people services to help them get safe housing, rather than just kicking them off the land to be homeless somewhere else. Obviously homelessness has too many thorny side-issues for there ever to be a clean solution, but this seems to be a pretty okay one.
I'm not surprised these people are unable to afford housing in the center of the Silicon Valley (even if it's the "area they grew up in"), though.
I imagine that in the next decade, the USA (and California in particular) will learn that there exists a tipping point where a homelessness crisis turns into proper slums/favelas/shanty-towns. The middle-income and developing world is replete with examples of this happening, and America is foolish to think itself immune. Since the current trajectory of increasing economic disparity and insufficient home construction in desirable areas is likely to continue, the result should not be any surprise.
One has to assume that the result of this article is these unfortunate folks will be kicked out of this property. Or at least, there's a good chance of this. Please writers have a heart.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 33.9 ms ] threadPerhaps I don't quite appreciate the complexity of this problem, but creating housing for 6,000 people seems pretty feasible and achievable. And really the city only needs to create space for 5,000 people since they already have 1,000 beds.
While a 1,000 to 6,000 capacity is a significant percentage growth, this just doesn't feel like an insurmountable problem. It seems like it should be pretty easy to resolve (building housing for these people) by a city government especially with a public private partnership and support from a major tech company.
Even if scaling 1,000 to 6,000 is hard, surely some incremental improvement (1,000 to 1,500 for example) should be possible
Portland spent $58M on a jail built in the 90s that never opened and was then sold a few years back for just a few million (maybe 5 or 6 years ago). The owner said they would donate the site as a homeless shelter if the city ran it since they had a ballooning homeless problem (over 4K as of last count). City leaders felt that because it was formerly a jail and not near services that it would be inhumane to house homeless there. So instead they continue to sleep on the streets, get hit crossing the freeway and shitting on the sidewalks. It finally opened just before winter last year, but mostly because of NGO helping to get it running...the government is completely useless here. Total people currently off the street is only 45 since it still needs a lot of work.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/06/09/a-homeless-shelter-in-...
Also, I don't know the economics of homelessness, but I feel like as supply of homeless shelters increased, demand for the beds would increase as well, right? How elastic is local demand, with people in RVs moving in/out of an area?
Not that it shouldn't be done, but it seems like if all it took to "solve" homelessness was building enough beds, we would already be doing that.
No, you likely don't appreciate the complexity.
Homeless people are people. "Canned" solutions for 6000 people who have only one thing in common -- they are poor and living in X area -- tend to not work.
Across the entire nation, we do desperately need to figure out how to let the market provide housing that makes sense for people and is affordable. A large piece of that is removing barriers to market-based housing development and we tend to not focus on that.
Of course, the current NYC capacity isn't enough for the number of homeless in NYC, but it's proof that housing and support for thousands of homeless people is possible by a city.
Homelessness is a symptom of deep issues in the US. We have broken housing policy. We have bad healthcare policy. We have saddled a lot of people with student loans under conditions where the loans are a huge burden and the education they got wasn't the slam dunk solution to making life work that we convinced them it would be.
Homelessness means "The lives of these people simply don't work for some reason." Lack of housing is one element of that, but it's not the entire issue.
We need to design an America where the lives of most ordinary people work again. Where you don't need a college degree or can get one without it being an undo burden. One where if you are willing to work and aren't a criminal etc, then it's possible to make your life work.
There's no single thing that will get us there, though fixing our broken housing policy such that affordable housing can exist again would be an important step forward.
I know one issue a lot of homeless who are working to get back up on their feet face is even having a stable address to receive mail or include when applying to jobs etc.
I'm with you that there are many other issues and that homelessness is one symptom of a problem, but providing some stability through housing and food seems like a productive, and achievable first step for a city government to accomplish.
The problem is how it's done.
I've eaten in soup kitchens. It tends to be lousy food and I was homeless because I have a serious medical condition and I eating healthy is critical to my ability to function at all.
A lot of homeless people have serious health issues and the attitude is "Beggars can't be choosers. Eat the free stuff that's been put in front of you." when sometimes that free stuff is actively harming their health and if you count the medical cost for requiring more medication and the opportunity cost in lost wages because they remain too sick to work, that "free meal" is an expensive as hell choice to make.
The longer I was on the street, the more I avoided things like soup kitchens, which not only tend to provide lousy food, they expose you to other people who are sick, coughing, haven't bathed recently, and are smoking either cigarettes or marijuana. I have a respiratory condition and am, additionally, allergic to marijuana. Soup kitchens were a nightmare.
What I think we ought to do is expand the food stamp program and lower the barriers to getting food stamps. Food stamps are put on a card, much like a debit card, and you spend it as you see fit and it gives you access to normal middle class food sources, like grocery stores.
Food is absolutely an essential and good quality food programs help protect the health of the people and mitigate the impacts of poverty, but many things aimed at "helping the homeless" are amazingly bad to the point of being mostly counterproductive in my first-hand experience as someone who was homeless for nearly 6 years. And when you are homeless, no one wants to hear your criticisms of this terrible program and how it doesn't actually meet your need. They expect you to be grateful while putting a gun to your head and saying "If you aren't eating at the awful soup kitchen, it's your own damn fault you can't solve your problems."
We really don't do a good job of helping America's poor access opportunity. This is no longer the land of opportunity and that's the crux of the problem.
If you can't already afford a new car and a big house, your life is likely slipping into the toilet rather than climbing towards a better future and it's incredibly hard to fight against the many trends pushing you down as just an individual being crushed under the boot of myriad larger forces.
I would like to see more mail services for the homeless generally, but the shelter system seems to be as bad as soup kitchens or worse and I never once spent the night in a homeless shelter.
https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/our-programs/advocac...
I honestly and sincerely believe that most people simply don't know how to fix this and that is an underlying cause of the "lack of political will." It's why I research answers and have for a long time and write about it. I sincerely believe that if I can pinpoint the pain points and viable solutions, there will be people who will act on it and if they succeed, others will be happy to copy them.
Once someone is homeless for a while, it's hard to help them because they develop mental health and substance abuse issues if they didn't already.
I fully agree that being homeless is traumatic enough that it creates mental health issues. I feel like I have some kind of financial and social PTSD from nearly 6 years on the street.
But I think the perception that homeless people are all junkies is likely rooted in prejudice. It takes money to get high all the time. Serious drug users I've personally known had jobs, sometimes quite well-paid jobs.
You don't snort tons of cocaine by panhandling. I mostly saw evidence of alcohol and marijuana use by other homeless people. Granted, there are some hard core addicts who are homeless and that gets a lot of press, but the "face of the homeless" tends to be the most visibly homeless and problematic. The reality is there are homeless people with jobs, going to college, etc and doing all they can to not be discovered for fear of being fired, etc.
I once tried to volunteer with a local non-profit for homeless people. It was clear that the city was actively thwarting their efforts.
There are myriad issues that put one at risk of ending up homeless, such as disability, health issues and various other barriers to regular employment. Helping people with those issues, regardless of housing status or financial status, is a better way to reduce the incidence of homelessness overall.
The statisitics back this up, as well. The top causes of homelessness for individuals and families are economic[1].
[1] https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_...
But the level of intervention required per homeless person is going to vary significantly. Some of them are just in a really precarious financial situation and that's "easy" to fix.
Some others are suffering from mental illness, addiction and chronic diseases. Having a roof over their heads will sure help fixing these issues, but it can't to it all.
I’m no expert, but this doesn’t sound much like normal housing or camping? It seems to be its own thing.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/amp/S-F-officials-want-...
I'm not surprised these people are unable to afford housing in the center of the Silicon Valley (even if it's the "area they grew up in"), though.