Everyone already knows that the more money California spends on homeless, the more of them will come to California.
It's a service. The state/city that provides the best service for homeless people - that's where I will try to go if I don't have a home.
Politicians don't seem to understand this. Or maybe they do, but they do the wrong thing in order to drum up politically correct votes.
Take San Francisco. It spends $400m on homeless each year. With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved. Are you homeless? Make your way to San Francisco. The tax payers in the city will buy you a home in Idaho - no questions asked.
> With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved.
The problem is that people become homeless due to a number of reasons that include addiction, mental illness, trauma, loss of work, etc. It’s not going to be solved by JUST providing them an apartment. At least not for everyone.
As someone who ended up homeless despite not fitting the typical profile - and has volunteered hundreds (possibly thousands) of hours in the space - you dramatically overstate the case for involuntary homelessness.
There couldn’t be a more significant difference between the homeless populations in places like SF and in other cities in the US with more sensible policies. There’s massively more people in California who are there because they’re voluntarily opting into a lifestyle where all of their capital expenditures are provided by taxpayers and they don’t have to do anything to maintain them other than to remain homeless. Many of these people may seem insane due to their drug use but their mental issues are a result, not a cause; they’re still rational actors responding to a perverse set of incentives.
That's right. That's the hell hole San Francisco created. The city officials thought the tech tax money would never run out. Let's do extremely expensive feel-good, politically correct stuff to make people think we have a good heart.
The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.
> The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.
It at least keeps people alive. The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.
> Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative solutions are required.
And which ones, bar building housing, should that be?
Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home (or being judged too unworthy of credit by three ultra-large black box corporations) is inhumane and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
> Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home
But we should lock them up for the crime of doing crime: dealing drugs, drunk and disorderly, assault, robbery, theft etc.
> and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
The cut-price solution is clearly no solution at all.
> Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
These people meed help, and a drug-free environment is a place they can receive that help.
> And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
There are other places where some of these people (the ones without crippling mental health issues) stand a far better chance of building a stable life for themselves
Seriously mentally ill and addicted should be involuntarily committed. I know that's a big decision and will lead to abuse but the alternative of just having them roam the streets is worse. The "temporarily homeless" as I like to call them, those who want to be productive but have fallen on hard times, deserve access to affordable housing. The government can build huge amounts of tiny apartments to give these people, it worked in Chicago until they recently gave up and converted those units.
> Martin cited a study from May 2018 by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which found 75 percent of the people on the street in Los Angeles County had a home in that same county before they lost it. It also showed that 65 percent of the unsheltered homeless had lived in that county for at least 20 years. Only 13 percent were from out of state.
Those stats are outdated and generally somewhat dubious—what was the methodology here? Nonetheless, it is clear CA generates a lot of homeless. The linked study from 2018 claimed 52,765 homeless in LA county, while the count by the same group performed in 2022 tallied 69,144. Either there's a been a massive influx of people on the streets or their methodology is improving. Perhaps both. Pretty wild to think about.
This ignores the fact that many of the homeless have other problems than just a lack of a roof over their heads. Drug addiction and untreated mental health issues are common (and overlap); domestic violence is another (related) cause for some of the homeless. Many of these issues don't go away by throwing houses at the problem.
Anyhow the main problem with the Idaho idea, beyond the politics/optics: what about getting the homeless into jobs? I don't think Idaho is overflowing with those, and I expect some of the homeless will be better off of employed.
Does that free apartment in Idaho also come with food, drug treatment, social services, and at least the remote possibility of actually getting a job, all in Idaho?
The logical (and operative) end of this thought process is "make them miserable and they'll leave."
Some/many politicians do implement these kinds of policies, but you'll rarely hear the quite part out loud.
Nasty problems breed dishonesty. Humane homeless policies increases homelessness, and the visibility of homelessness... especially if homeless migration is prevalent.
The inhumane homelessness reduction policy is "abuse homeless people, then some will go away" No one wants to admit the other side of whatever coin they like. C'est la politique.
SF and similar CA cities have set up a program that encourages people to move there because it makes being “homeless” an actual possible lifestyle choice. Even an enjoyable one.
Hmm. I wonder if you could say "if someone becomes homeless in your locality, your locality has failed them". And then rate localities/states by their net loss of citizens that have fallen "outside society". Then begin incentivizing communities to fix these problems. There's only so much a local community can do with limited funds, but while I'm sure the majority of homeless in California are Californian... I would love other states to take ownership of citizens they export/extrude. :s
I agree. From my research, Portugal’s drug assistance programmes for the homeless are quite effective.
For those in more of a poverty trap situation, Finland has done quite a good job finding the right set of policies for their country to bring levels down so far that most Americans would consider them to have “solved” homelessness.[1]
Yes. States aren’t powerless to implement mental health requirements and programmes though. It is a cop-out to suggest that states and cities don’t use the full breadth of their legislative powers because the federal government made a bad policy decision over 4 decades ago.
The Feds may not be “to blame”. But it’s hard to see how individual states can solve this problem.
Any program by any state that helps the homeless in a country where you legally cannot create state level borders (and with the homeless you can’t establish residency by definition) would immediately draw homeless people across the country, especially since the homeless strategy in many states is to pay for one way bus tickets to a different state, and quickly overwhelm and undermine what could otherwise have been a successful program.
Any successful program must be funded and implemented at the Federal level.
Let me just quality a bit further: homelessness is a failure of the neoliberal ideology (land free markets/privatization never worked, from the enclosures [1] to modern times, see Georgism for a solution [2]) and further a failure of the metaphysics of meritocracy based in desert-people's belief "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground", which simply isn't the case today, and it certainly won't be the case in a few decades when all the jobs will be gone forever, hopefully.
Not sure how much of a downtrend, seems rather stable [1]. There are also 0 countries that implement Georgist policies and most of the countries in the world are directly neoliberal or neoliberal-bent, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia [2], and friends included.
Perhaps I am not correct, but what do you think will happen in a few years when we will have a 100 GB neural model able to drive any car in any environment, effectively obliterating 200+ million jobs worldwide? Fairly certain, if we keep the same policies and the same belief-system, homelessness will trend rather high.
Ah, the Georgism fans. Thinking that every single problem in the world can be solved via a land value tax.
It is actually one of the few groups I've found that are worse than the socialist class reductionists, who think that every problem exists "because capitalism".
Yes, a land value tax can be a useful policy. But it simply has little relevance to the topic of people who are homeless because of mental issues.
And you bringing up georgism demonstrates a lack of engagement on the issue, and instead an attempt to shoe horn in your favorite ideology into any possible issue.
People could be paid to move or otherwise offered lots of benefits and best quality of life opportunities to do so. And paying people to move would be much cheaper than the amount of money we spend now on the problem to overpay for stuff in expensive cities.
The actual reason why we don't do this easy solution, is because home prices arent the sole cause of homelessness.
Simply doing the voluntary, cheap, and easy solution of giving people the voluntary choice to live in a much higher quality home in a low cost of living area simply wouldn't solve the issue.
"Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)" [1]. From a Georgist standpoint today's land is data. Do you have $30 million or more to be considered an ultra-high-net-worth individual [2]? If yes, congratulations, we are indeed enemies. If not, don't kid yourself, you are just as much hoi polloi as a homeless person. Do you even own a factory or you just embody bonded consciousness as a hobby [3]?
I just can't wait for the full consequences of automated statistics-based decision-making to develop into realtime embedded robotics, giving rise to the $100 trillion company, evaporating hundreds of millions of jobs, burning down the world as it is, but at least silencing these squeaky, visionless voices: fiat lucrum, et pereat mundus.
I literally gave you a Wikipedia list of other concerns, "natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)", the Georgist word land abstracts away, telling you the land of today is data, and the land of tomorrow will be neural models. Complex issues often have solutions in other places; houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.
55% of homeless were not mentally ill in January 2015 in "the most extensive survey ever undertaken" [1]. Not having a singular worldview is one query away.
> houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.
Thats my point though. That someone's buzzword ideology or singular solution isn't particularly relevant to this discussion, and that Georgists are the worst of the bunch.
Its actually the only group worse than the internet socialists who just blame "capitalism" for everything.
And georgism is actually worse in that it takes a single topic, that of "land" and just attempts to shoehorn that one concept into everything.
> the Georgist word land abstracts away
Oh thats exactly my point! They take one single word, from an ideology of that was outdated even 100 years ago, and pretend like it applies to every single problem.
What if, instead of that, not everything has to do with "land"? Maybe, different problems are solved by different things and we don't have to stress the definition of the word "land" to apply to literally every single problem.
But my point is "complex issues often have solutions in other places".
You just hate operator overloading, I understand. Hope you don't write much C++.
I do have a tendency to overload solutions, since there are so many problems. For instance, just to give you something more to kick, I believe all democratic issues would be solved by three changes in the electoral process:
(i) no political nominations, instead have a population-wide lottery, arbitrarily selecting 10 or so people as contenders [1]; (the principle behind: power should belong to those who do not want it)
(ii) to be able to vote "No", invalidating all the candidates, if majority vote, reducing the mandate duration, if not; (the principle behind: you are not free if you cannot say "No")
(iii) tie the mandate duration to the voter turnout: if only 60% vote, you get 60% of the duration of the mandate, not 100%. (the principle behind: politicians are better if they are changed often)
If we're going to put the SF homeless problem on "neoliberal ideology", we should also give "neoliberal ideology" (e.g. free markets/trade/globalization) credit for lifting almost a billion people out of poverty in developing nations (mainly China, India) in the 00s.
For India, yes, the MGNREGA [1] is very "neoliberal", we all know how neoliberals care about social security, social equity, guaranteed wage employment, environment protection, women empowerment, and so on.
For China: "When the poverty headcount dropped below 10 percent of the rural
population, targeted poverty alleviation and social protection systems started playing a more important role." [2], how neoliberal of them.
Meanwhile, "more than 800 million Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand" [3], who needs oxygen anyway.
Enclosure worked perfectly well as it consolidated productive land in the hands of the powerful without the attached commoners that they were at least notionally responsible for. I cannot think of a greater disenfrachisement in the Western world other than chattel slavery.
Enclosure directly lead to absolutely massively increased agricultural production. Literally doubled the amount of food available. It was one of the most effective public policies of all time.
Why? Is it illegal to discriminate based on place of birth?
It seems like it'd be politically palatable to allow places to run homeless programs that are only available to locals. There isn't a downside for anyone.
How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
Quite serious. It isn't like free movement stops people from implementing a local plan against homelessness.
> How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
I'm not sure what point you're wanting to make here, but yes. If a group of locals wants to solve homelessness in their area they will need to decide on answers to those questions. Frankly they aren't hard questions. Born in a geographic area or owned a home for 5+ years, yes, no, yes if they owned a home locally.
How do define who gets to be a citizen for a federal response to homelessness? It faces exactly the same problems. America can't afford to provide welfare for all of Asia.
First, homeless people tend to be much less likely to have the wherewithal to prove residency, either due to substance problems, difficulty navigating bureaucracy, or just not having the money to chase down paperwork or a safe place to store it. So hurdles like "being local", essentially whatever it means, could prove to be a huge barrier to uptake of your programs.
Second, "solving homelessness" for just one subset of homeless people may not actually provide the benefit you hope for. You might still have tent cities, RV encampments, people using drugs outdoors, etc. Now the people doing that are from just past city limits and entitled to no support.
Sure. Common Chinese factory workers live in 6-12 people dormitory. Homeless people get evicted from the capital city. Major city have rule in place to prevent non local people buying property,
Let’s do that.
Yes, I agree. Despite Houston being one of the top cities in the US for homelessness, they have a slightly lower rate of homelessness than the US average.
However, their homelessness rate is higher than the Texas average.
Because certain areas of the country have better services for homeless people, because certain areas are livable/hospitable year-round, because some places bus homeless people to other areas? Probably mostly the first 2 reasons but the third doesn't help.
Certain areas are inherently easier to be homeless in, regardless of local programs.
Try sleeping outside for a year in Phoenix or in Minneapolis. Try getting resources in a sprawling suburb without access to a car. It seems clear that SF, with its dense, walkable layout, access to public transit, and year round moderate climate, would be vastly preferable to most areas of the US.
> has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless
How many are from California and how many were given a bus pass to California by a government content to move the homeless around or on their own accord made their way to California as it has some of the best services?
How many are the same homeless people and how many are new homeless people who have replaced the old homeless people, making it appear that no progress has been made, but in reality there may just be greater need?
From the many hundreds of homeless people I’ve met in SF, there’s been a massive increase of out-of-state movement. That said, they seem to mostly come of their own volition - they realize the combination of the nice weather and massive resources available means they have a pretty maintainable lifestyle.
It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time, yet still unable to afford rent.
I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in addressing the housing market; which in California is really really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws) but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way Austria has controlled rent prices (though californians might not like the fact that around 70% of housing in austria is limited or non profit).
Also, this is a US-wide problem. California just has the best weather and open doors. But I doubt it's going to get better, wealth inequality does nothing but increase in the US. We'll see, but this looks to me more of a symptom than a sickness in itself.
Austria doesn't have a coordinated federal housing policy either, it's mostly just Vienna that aggressively builds city- or NPO-owned housing (and even there it's "only" about 40-45%¹).
And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to everyone at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to long-term unemployed. I'm not sure how well that'd go with American sensibilities.
The most frustrating part of that is the absurd number of people who see the obvious problem of wildly expensive and tightly constrained housing supply, complain about it being impossible to buy a home, and then actively refuse to even allow for the possibility that cities may have been under-building for some time.
Well you can only vote either Republican or Democrat, should you become a single issue voter? What if neither of the parties is really proposing strong housing regulation anyway.
Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue?
This mostly isn't a Republican versus Democrat issue. Most housing development decisions are made at the county and city level, and those races are usually either non-partisan, or effectively single party. You can just show up at a campaign event and ask the candidate for their positions on housing issues.
There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's some points from a laypersons' point of view.
Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, economic whatnots, etc.
The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a long time. This caused both high end investors and relative laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market, and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up anything.
Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and employers have been getting away with tightening the thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed to.
Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass migrations; people can't live where there's no water.
There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks and there's no quick fix.
Seems like just a simple supply issue. These complex zoning regulations have made it cost prohibitive for developers to make any margins unless they focus on high-end condo's or apartments. The zoning envelopes need to be re-worked so that builders aren't having to live on razor thin margins.
High level, statistically speaking, there's a lot of evidence that homelessness correlates with housing prices. What's remarkable is how mad people get about the pretty self-explanatory notion that as a thing increases in costs, fewer people can afford it. They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. And while those do play a part for many people, the price of housing is what looms over it all:
Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at the same time the housing market is like a big factory that produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of assistance that can be brought to bear.
>They want to blame drugs or mental health or something.
Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to property prices and rents and thats the last thing investors want.
They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see people dying on the street than that, but theyre not comfortable admitting it.
Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda anything except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing construction.
False. I want more units. There is a demand and I want to meet that demand for money. I want to buy land that people can't afford and subdivide it to make it available to them. Win win.
Single family home owners are the people who oppose density with their entire being. I hear them cry about traffic, parking, their view, noise, about their neighborhood's character. That regime is the problem.
If it is profitable I will build housing all day long. If you cap rents and require unprofitable units to be built, I can't build as much. Then you are left competing for the finite supply of single family homes. Good luck!
My property has rent control. Two 600 dollar a month units. Unprofitable. No way to get those to market so I Ellis act the whole thing. Good work rent control, you just made a 4 unit building into a single family home.
Now there are some more regulations that disincentivize rebuilding by requiring unprofitable units or restoring the previous rental level. Great, let's delay building +10 units for a decade.
These controls are so hair brained and only make the situation worse. You don't need social housing, you just need to get out of the way of the market.
The fastest rate of home building was in New York during the 1950s. The strictest rent controls were in New York in the 1950s.
The slowest is today when rent controls are weakest.
It's not that it doesn't have an effect, but it is small and is absolutely overwhelmed by the lowering of property taxes. When property taxes are low, even the shittiest units making the most inefficient use of land like yours can tick over making a small profit and this eats land which would otherwise be used to build denser housing.
Lowered property taxes also kicked property values sky high which in turn led to the NIMBY revolution. This also inhibited home building in a massive, massive way.
In order to fix the housing crisis landlords who use land inefficiently to start losing money in a big way. That way they will finally dump their properties and the land can be redeveloped efficiently.
They must be subjected to market discipline otherwise the housing market will never be fixed. The velvet glove treatment of their rent entitlements is entirely unsustainable.
How are landlords your target for inefficiency when (complete guess) 50%+ of land is being used for single family homes?
My property is going from 4 units to a personal residence due to rent control. It is unprofitable. It is not being developed further despite that being my initial plan because those restrictions would carry over to the new units (SB 8). You will never convince me these programs are good. They are literally taking housing off the market.
This is zoned for 14 units. I will sit on it for 10 years due to SB 8. Great policy to prevent housing development.
Also, the "build more homes" makes a big assumption about _where_ the homes should be built.
There are already small towns across the US where homes are ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in fact people are moving out.
If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply.
Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up probably would.
Don’t think building more homes in SF would help with homeless problems. The thing about SF and CA in general is that it is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world.
They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle.
I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash. There’s no other conclusion to reach about how policy makers truly think about this class of people with the way the incentives of these “support” programs are structured.
How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”?
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
I don’t have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue for fewer rules, not more. So I’d like to understand your point better.
Drug-addicts is something you interpret. It is specified that they are homeless.
Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people.
For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.
My problem when I was homeless wasn’t that I was poor. My problem was that I would never be able to manage assets properly until I get my mental house in order and started prioritizing things properly.
There are plenty of homeless people who are in a poverty trap, as you describe, but I think it oversimplifies the situation to argue the arrow of causality only goes one direction for all homeless people.
Bregman I am referring is Dutch, I am Danish. Two countries where you'd have to look really hard to find homeless people.
I think over-complication is the issue in the states, which in turn makes a lot of these grants go to heads thinking about the issues rather than the actual issues.
I also think it is important to attribute issues where they are due: Mental issues is not a housing problem, it is a health care issue. Not being able to manage money is not a housing problem, it is a primary school problem. Etc.
With all respect for your previous life, it does sound like you needed some quality health care more than a parental system that handed out food stamps (in fear that the money otherwise would have gone to drugs).
I agree completely with your third paragraph; I also agree regarding the Dutch (my partner lives in Amsterdam) and Danish programmes and their successes. Apologies if my reply misunderstood your initial post, as I feel we’re actually in agreement here.
I can see that you're not in California, so I feel like I should reiterate that drugs are a massive problem among our homeless population here. It is something that needs consideration when trying to help them. The main problem with just giving people $1,000/mo is that it is nowhere near enough to get off the street, but more than enough to continue fueling a drug problem.
That, and part of the problem seems to be that when people say "get them off the streets" the hidden statement is "but keep them in SF"
SF is a ridiculously expensive city that people from across the US consider (who have homes even) consider themselves priced out of.
It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).
Constructing that suburb would create jobs. The infrastructure needed to maintain it would create jobs. And even if it remains a net cash drain, it'll still likely be cheaper than 17B a year while giving people actual homes with opportunities to work their way up and out
> It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).
The problem is that many homeless people would genuinely rather live on the streets or in shelters in the city proper where they have easy access to the things they want, versus having a house provided elsewhere.
They want housing near their preferred begging spots and their dealers, basically.
That lends itself to other solutions though, if there's the political will to implement them.
To take an unpopular example: Iran
Iran provides food and shelter to all it's citizens, making sure everyone has their minimum needs met. They've combined this with strict laws against begging. If they see anyone begging on the street someone will come up to them and ask "Why are you begging? Do you have some basic need that's still unmet?"
Outcomes will range from:
- Helping them with that need (if it's legitimate)
- Directing them to getting some kind of job if they merely want more income (even if it's selling trivial knick knacks on the street)
- Presumably there's penalties for repeat offenders
None of this is true. Iran has extreme poverty, people have bare access to food these days and there's a massive amount of child beggars in the street. People are selling body parts to get access to food.
I have lived in San Fransisco an commuted through Tenderloin.
I am not opposing that they are statistically related. But it is not OK to assume that people are drug addicts when they tell that they are homeless. That is normal human decency.
Maybe money isn't the right thing - it may reduce crime, but won't fix issues. But there's plenty of successful programs where they give drugs or substitutes to prevent withdrawal to addicts for free, no questions asked, no judgment. Or places to safely use, where privacy, health care and clean needles are available.
But the subject isn't addicts, it's homeless people. Not all homeless people are addicts, and not all addicts are homeless.
The majority of homeless people are homeless for economic reasons, like loss of income, cost of living increases, or lack of affordable housing, or changes in co-living situations caused by break-ups/divorce/abuse/loss of partner's income/etc.
Families are the fastest growing homeless demographic.
And that group is hurt the most by having to share the streets with people whose uncivil and dangerous behaviour puts their life and well being in danger.
Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy.
> Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy
It gives you some useful tricks, though. E.g. if somebody complains about the chronically homeless addicts assaulting people downtown? Why, you just point out that X% of "the homeless" are actually just regular non-addicted people temporarily down on their luck, who just need a free hotel room for a couple weeks.
It's unfortunate. Most of the conversation here is about addicts and the mentally ill and how hard they are to help. Probably because they are the most visible.
We should have separate programs for each, one with more resources. It is much easier to help someone without a substance abuse problem get back on their feet, so let’s pick the lowest fruit first? It also provides some incentive to not get addicted to drugs, knowing that society is going to not try as hard to save you (this is already true, it just isn’t codified anywhere).
But ya, most people won’t notice, since they didn’t notice these people before.
Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their needs is the peak of inhumanity.
Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because usually at the top of the list is "drugs".
There other services provided en-masse for homeless people with addiction problems but you can't force them to take advantage of them.
The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the recipients addiction the hope is to address a symptom and prevent people with addiction problems from committing crimes to fuel their habits.
I’m not at all against unconditional cash grants. I work for a non-profit that does just that.
What I am against is a totally unstructured program where they hand cash out knowing that 90% of it goes into an open air drug market that they make no attempt to shut down or control.
I’m not arguing for work requirements or time limits. People who are legitimately struggling will fall through the cracks. But I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance and be put on a pathway to supportive housing.
The parent seems to be saying that they are not sure whether work requirements are necessary for a support program to succeed, but that the requirements do not appear to be unreasonable or obviously counter-productive.
Why did you cut off the sentence? What I said had nothing to do with employment requirements but about the need for supportive services to enable unhoused persons to achieve the next steps in their path to stability.
If the money is just going back to the drug dealers I would think that would just exacerbate the problem and make it even worse, as it just encourages drug dealers and producers to make and sell more.
There definitely needs to be case workers or someone involved to help provide these people a path to recovery.
I don't really understand the point you are making. "I'm not arguing for work requirements... But I don't think its insane to require people to work." So, you are in favor of work requirements then?
This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the homelessness problem.
Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work requirements is not simple. And I think you need some evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.
He said "I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance", meaning to have the people engage with supportive assistance. Not "get a job before we help you" but "talk to the counselor while we're helping you"
Because they are not going to spend it on things that's going to help them improve skills and finding jobs, they'll stuck as homeless forever.
Like when world bank lend money to country that are bankrupted, they ask them to take the money for reform and try to improve their economy, same should happen here.
> How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”?
If access to money is not their actual impediment then you may be making their situation worse.
> I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?
> argue for fewer rules
Judging by living in the middle of this policy. The number of homeless has increased and the number of open air drug markets, prostitution, and suicides have increased with them. There is a concerted _lack_ of enforcement of rules. The homeless purchase RVs from scrap yards, move them onto the sides of streets, and live in them.
Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. And our response is just.. "here's $1000 and a legal carte blanche for anything short of murder."
One of the most under appreciated aspects of this is that the current policies actually hurt the homeless people who are stuck in a poverty trap and want to get out. They have to live daily with an ever increasing number of people who are allowed to engage in dangerous and uncivil behaviour. There are parents and children on the streets who want nothing more than to get off them - but until that happens, their quality of life has been made considerably worse by the policies presently in place.
>> You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?
> You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the water will spit them out if you pay it.
And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make your problem worse. That $1000 might as well be considered a pile of drugs or booze.
When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they realized they were just getting pawned.
I'm with ya. My point is that his metaphor illustrates how even a helpful for the problem solution might not be helpful given the stipulations he's putting on the help.
But a homeless person can easily take a drug test.
The real analogy would be that you have to consent to the would-be savior to verify you are actually drowning. Im not sure anyone drowing would think “no thanks ill take my chances”.
"Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. "
How do you pay to enforce all of this?
Do jails have adequate space?
Are there enough judges, courtrooms, and public defender's to handle this efficiently?
Where should the children go?
"It's not working"
What are your suggestions for aiding people to be able to afford rent and sustaining themselves?
> How do you pay to enforce all of this? Do jails have adequate space?
Well if you cant enforce it and jails don’t have adequate space shouldn’t you put more resources to those things? Or do you not actually think it should be enforced nor should people be put in jail?
I don't think this is a fair response. Throwing a conditional means-tested $1000 to a drowning man wouldn't save them either. You are grouping in different policies and treating them as if you have to accept a package deal or nothing. The binary choice is a false illusion.
I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing. However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely point to a study validating the effectiveness of it, because the reality of means-testing is that it:
a) Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost efficient
b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people who need help behind
c) Tends to create poverty traps and weird distorting incentives.
I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the impact on society as a whole. This is a separate discussion.
In reality though, I think most people on both sides think of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one of two solutions to these issues:
1) Making it difficult for those who are unhoused.
2) Trying to improve the situation of those who are unhoused.
The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it with cities and towns busing their homeless to other places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the problem nationally become worse.
On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid on the core issue.
The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and unfortunately this is an area which California has struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the same time.
People addicted to heroin don't achieve their potential or their aspirations. The compassionate thing to do for drug addicts is to help them stop being addicted to drugs, not give them an apartment where they can do drugs without bothering anybody. Parent commenter is saying the state is doing mostly the latter and little of the former.
I didn’t state any numbers. I don’t know. All I have is anecdotes from myself and others who work in this space.
That said, you don’t think even 1 in 9 people being out of staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see how you can migrate and live far more easily than in Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won’t increase? That there isn’t a negative psychic impact to homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the system having to live around many others who are content to collect their scrip?
I’m skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who both originate from within, and outside, California.
> I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is.
Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you are arguing with that imaginary person.
It is more powerful. Data is often meaningless without interpretation, missing many dimensions, easily and often manipulated, funded by unknown desires and forces, and generally unreliable. Outside of the hardest of sciences it’s worse than worthless.
Meanwhile a single sharp person who lives in a city and interacts with the right intersection of people will tell you closer to the truth than even the better quality studies or media outlets. To think otherwise is imo foolish.
You're right it's much better to rely on information that is expected to be meaningless, has zero dimensions, is guaranteed to be biased, has no backing, and is scientifically proven to be unreliable.
If your trust for first hand accounts from people you trust is meaningless, I feel sorry for you. And if you aren’t able to intuit their biases based on your history with them and take that into account, more so.
That you seemingly missed the caveat that I mentioned about “hard sciences” also not a good sign.
Even supposing that is true, which seems very unlikely, it is clearly untrue of the SF homeless population in general and of the East Bay homeless population.
OK, I don't go to the Mission much. What I was trying to say was that putting that anecdote out there risks being a bit misleading, since obviously the vast majority of homeless people on Market St / Tenderloin, and in the East Bay, are not Mexican immigrants, illegal or otherwise. Unless you concede that point, readers of this thread are going to conclude that it is you that is trying to shoehorn reality into a form that you find palatable. If you genuinely think that the majority of homeless people in SF / East Bay are illegal immigrants, then I don't know which adjective to choose -- deranged, deluded, absurd?
They are implying that illegal immigration is relevant to the grotesque problem with hundreds of drug-addicted, mentally ill Americans living in squalor in SF in a way that makes America look like a third-world country. That sort of shameless and self-serving lying has become very familiar in recent years due to political trends in the USA but we do not want it on HN.
If I recall correctly, this source was criticized because their measurement for being "out of state" was that you haven't been in CA for 2 years or so. So if someone had come in 2+ years ago for the CA homeless benefits then they would be considered not out of state.
I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that information. If they used county records, it's a very different trust paradigm than if they just asked.
On the other hand, $1K a month in SF won't even get you a bed in a shared room. I mean that literally - I just checked apartments.com and there's exactly one listing out of 5,400 right now that's under $1000 and open to non-students.
They don’t need a bed or a room. You can camp quite comfortably throughout the city all year long thanks to the mild weather.
It’s a very different situation than being homeless in cities with more typical seasonal weather patterns; I nearly lost a number of toes due to frostbite when I was homeless in Saint Louis during a major blizzard. San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.
> San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.
Of course they don't. Living out of a tent on a street makes it extremely hard to get your life onto target for rejoining the economically healthy portion of society. I'm sure you know that. I don't know what you were trying to say.
Where do you get the idea apartments.com is a source that can inform you about the market price of shared housing?
As a long-time participant in the bay area rental housing market, $1000 is enough to rent a bedroom in many homes, but how would such a listing get onto apartments.com?
If you’re paying more than $1000 to share a bedroom, you’re getting ripped off.
Your comment does not provide any concrete example. Even if what you say is true, access is a real issue. You think homeless people would know how to find those $1000 options if a random person cannot find them via a simple search?
Of course, most people would prefer to room with family or friends (especially if we’re talking about multiple people in the same room). That’s not an SF issue, it’s human nature. So a lot of roommate groups are going to be formed through word-of-mouth, or smaller community group chats/boards.
You can absolutely find a bedroom for 1000/m, but you're going to have to interact with people.
Check how long those apartments have been listed for, some of them have been listed for a year. If it's an actual competitive price it will get rented immediately.
There are shared housing groups on facebook that will reflect the situation more accurately.
This is not surprising at all. Currently it’s all about affirmation and validation and being your true authentic self. Suggesting alterations to lifestyles implies that some lifestyles might be inferior to others. Would this implication end at drug use or could it be extended to other areas of life as well? When you extrapolate this a bit further you could quickly get yourself labeled closed-minded and a bigot. Therefore just throwing cash non-judgmentally at these problems and hoping the issues go away is the only path forward for many.. alternatives would be too uncomfortable to stomach.
There's also simply no good solution for people with mental health issues. People who need help aren't scooped up & put somewhere for treatment. They're left on the street.
There are a lot of people making money in the current system. It's pretty obvious that just giving money to people trapped in a cycle of addiction is not going to break that cycle.
They need treatment and in many cases it might need to be compelled to break the cycle. This then needs to be followed with integration programs (and jobs, schooling) that do not happen in the same area where they spent their time addicted.
>It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash.
Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada.
When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and that we should give them (the users and the NGOs) money and safe-supply drug and leave them alone on the street.
There's a pervasive belief that homeless people in various comfortable climes are migrants from harsher locales, but when you do the research you apparently tend to find that they're overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there: they aren't "imported". So the "warmest place in Canada" thing is unlikely to be meaningful, unless there's some reason a comfortable climate makes housing less stable.
I definitely see less homeless people in places that go to -40 in the winter. Now I don't know why, maybe they still exist but are less visible. Perhaps the threat of homelessness is a lot scarier when it is cold outside. Maybe homeless people in those climates move. I don't know, but anecdotally it does seem like there are much fewer homeless people in cold places.
But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).
(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).
>In the City of Vancouver’s 2019 homeless count, based on those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.
If you go to the actual report[1] instead of whatever this site is, you'll see that question (3.9) was asking where they lived before they moved to Vancouver, not before they became homeless or whatever that site is attempting to imply.
If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became homeless, which is the data to match the claim ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there").
So they moved to Vancouver, had a home for a year, then become homeless. The news article did not claim that the homeless respondents were homeless before they moved; simply that they are not local to Vancouver.
If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you weren't financially stable to begin with.
EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them regardless of where they came from.
Vancouver isn't just the warmest place, it's also the most expensive. There definitely have been cases of other parts of the country paying for a bus ticket out to the coast, just like they did to homeless people in Vancouver, sending them to Victoria during the Winter Olympics.
Victoria, Nanaimo etc. also have significant homeless issues, and I fully support out of province homeless people moving to Vancouver for whatever reason they might have. Freedom of movement is important to democracy.
But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.
I used to live in Nanaimo as a kid (Go McGirr!). The city's economy was royally fucked in the 2000s. There were no jobs other than Provincial services like VIHA or the one paper mill that I think ended up shutting down. Hells Angels were also always a thing back there, and there was a reservation nearby which had some persistent social issues. I still have family there who ended up making a killing in construction thanks to Chinese money and idk if Nanimo will ever get better.
Harmac ended up being bought by the people who actually operated the mill from an American company that went bankrupt, and has been running well since 2008.
Oh! That's cool to hear! I went back to Nanaimo a couple years ago and it does seem much less grimy/blue collar than it was when I was a kid, but it does still seem to have that sense of PNW rust belt malaise to a certain extent.
Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief.
Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:
- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime
- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits
- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here
"Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4% outside California.
Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."
At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)
2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.
Do you have any data that is based on some combination of things that are good indications of someone making San Francisco their permanent home, e.g.
- tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)
- utility bill payments
- high school graduation (or even enrollment) records
- rent receipts or rental contracts
I'm not saying all of those are required. But if the data come from a biased source (like one whose existence or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are all from out of town), then it's hard to accept it when absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.
> Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief
I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence. Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?
> - The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with addressing the problem of homelessness?
If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California
If this were the case, I suspect proposed solutions would shift away from building and maintaining shelters and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and more toward helping people return home. The latter would require much less than the $600MM+ the DPHSH spends each year.
> At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I would encourage you to download and read the original homeless census report.
A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not really from SF, even if they technically become homeless while living in SF.
The majority of small towns in northern BC have been gradually depopulating for decades, due to economic pressures similar to those in the Rust Belt of the US. (And plus, it's just damn cold up there, so it's hard to be homeless if you do end up homeless.) Their populations have to be going somewhere.
Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.
But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.
I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.
These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
>these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also have their own homeless issues. I don't think their municipal gov would be open to the province providing relocation resources to these people.
Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.
Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them exit first.
The small towns in BC don’t have their homeless issues, because without services, you either die or are in a bus to Vancouver. A common route for homeless people in Montana is to wind up in Spokane first and then Seattle later, since you can’t really survive in MT at all without a job, and while Spokane used to provide a bunch of flop houses (my grandfather owned one), those are gone now and it is too cold to live unsheltered there in the winter. Cities do pick up much of a national problem because of the social resources they can provide, and accordingly only national solutions have a chance of working.
Prince George as non-failing? Have you been there? I've never seen so many zombified homeless junkies wandering aimlessly than I have in Prince George. Not in Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. Not in any other city. Prince George is horrific. Honestly the worst town or city I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. All of the 'normal' people inside businesses had thousand yard stares, shell shocked, and asked why I would even visit their town.
It's a bit more complex than that. At the surface, it's true - only 15% of homeless people in Seattle lived out of county before becoming homeless. But a deeper look shows as many as 30% more never really could afford housing - they had marginal housing situations, living with a friend, relative, or romantic partner without paying a proportionate share for their prior living situation.
This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15% number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45% number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're measuring.
Detox doesn't really work if they don't want it.
The active intervention w/r to homelessness would be to actually house these people. Lots of these people are using drugs to cope with other problems, without dealing with the other issues what are the chances of detox actually being worthwhile?
If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are just going to trash the place. Vancouver has been building and rebuilding support housing because the units get trashed and literally ripped apart after a week.
Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.
Maybe we need to do Australia again, but instead of for debtors it's for drug rehab. Just make sure the entire island we pick is drug-free. (Yes, there are obvious issues with this and it's likely incompatible with our current view of what a "free society" is).
That has been tried before. We stopped doing it because of how horrible it was. The homeless are better off than in the institutions of old.
I don't know if modern institutions could be better. However we know they failed in the past. If you want to propose them again, you need to provide some proof that they new ones will be better than the old.
Because I don't feel any shame out of what seems like the necessary thing to do. But maybe you can show me the commandment from on high where I should feel shame. Or better yet than shaming, you could provide an alternative that works.
> If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are just going to trash the place.
This is underreported to a criminal degree.
Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the first place.
We couldn't keep a roof over the head of a schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or stipends available to renovate your own home to the security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike problematic foster children, there is no state agency that pretends to have your back in this endeavor. Meanwhile you're cohabitating with someone regularly insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and occasionally molesting your family members, which does wonders for their mental health. Normally your entire family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the Rules of Society about as well as the criminal population. So in failing to solve one problem, you create five more.
Even more fun in California, since they become tenants of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the savvy ones will shake you down when you try to [unlawfully] evict them.
This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which is the same argument that has been made to excuse criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle either group.
The local political / NGO class are corrupt and in bed with the local construction companies. They all live in the same nice gated neighborhoods, go to the same clubs and schools, intermarry each other, etc. And so they all profit from this cycle of developing land on the taxpayers dime then letting it get trashed by the homeless. All the while the homeless continue to terrorize the general public, providing the impetus to keep this grift going.
The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and vote for any politician that offers a solution. The politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves and their NGO/developer friends (more money for more housing!), while not actually addressing the problem of homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians who seek to keep them locked into their destructive lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are given de facto permission to continue harassing regular people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from shops, wander through working class neighborhoods screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians who profit from it.
The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking around and trying to reform local politics.
Both of these approaches would work for some people, but neither works for everyone -- it's a very complicated and dynamic problem that has many causes, and many symptoms that are often mistaken for causes.
Active interventions is one thing, forced detox is another. This involves restricting someone's freedom of movement, subjecting them to a very unpleasant experience, and then dropping them back off in the same community with a massive drug craving and a lower tolerance.
> Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms. Given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.
Note that this systematic review looked at compulsory treatment methods besides just detox, but none of the results were that impressive.
There’s people on this forum who are homeless and quite popular. This person got quite angry when I asked about force detox. They said they didn’t want to have stipulations put on sober housing and would rather be homeless. My comment was greeted with hostility from many people.
Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy. In general people tend to react very badly when their body autonomy is violated: the results are trauma, CPTSD, suicide. I suggest we try other solutions first, starting from a place of compassion, empathy and scientifically tested medical advice.
Like detox centers, which exist to minimize trauma, suicide, and CPTSD.
> Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy.
Giving an addict a steady supply of money often just kills them (like my sister). I consider that some sort of violation. As is, letting addicts do drugs might sort itself out [1]. I imagine 2022-2023 numbers will be very very depressing.
The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this? It is done in NYC, and it was a major bone of contention that the high level of service was effectively magnetizing the city for homeless in other parts of the country to come here, or for cities even to bus them here. The law is a little vague on the matter, but the prevailing belief by the NYC administration is that anyone who can make it to the agency's doorstop and claim homelessness is entitled to emergency shelter up to 6 months, with no residency check (let alone U.S. citizenship), and there is no clear regulation preventing renewal. Even before the current foreign migrant crisis, about 10-15% of the shelter population came from outside NYC as their most recent stated prior address.
The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this?
Previous discussions on HN suggest that the official stats are misleading and, for example, will count one as "local" if their last official street address was time in a local prison.
By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless population "became homeless while living in SF."
Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10 years at the time of the census (the agency only has buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect the amount of time the person lived in SF before becoming homeless).
So, although they may have technically "become homeless while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years since they first got here, including time while homeless). Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25 when they first became homeless.
When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years).
It's probably even lower when you consider that the current episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only marginally housed when arriving).
> Only 17% reported being in SF for less than a year, what are you talking about?
Oh, looks like you forgot to add the 28% who were already experiencing homelessness when they arrived in SF. I’m sure that’s just an honest mistake.
> ahahaha oh okay you are insane.
So you believe that a homeless person who has lived in SF for 13 months, total, at the time they were surveyed is “from SF”? I’m not the one who created the reporting buckets.
I’m happy to change my mind given new data, but a person who has lived in a city for 1-10 years is not “from” that city. Maybe you should ask SF’s homeless census to report in more gradual buckets.
The statistic thrown around is something like “About 70 percent of people who are homeless became homeless while living in the Bay Area.” I’m not sure how to interpret this. I cant find the question they actually asked or how they collected people to survey.
Demographics of homeless populations is one of those things that is pretty hard to determine conclusively without some serious invasion of privacy and/or violation of rights.
Take in consideration that homeless folks are under no obligation to tell the truth when surveyed or questioned and are generally aware that "migration of homeless into certain areas" is a hot-button issue (these folks are homeless, not stupid)... and we have a recipe for the demographics of homeless populations in these 'desirable' areas being misreported and the percent of out-of-region homeless being under-reported as a rule.
Homeless folks definitely migrate to places that are more tolerant of homelessness and are all around "better" places to be homeless. SF, LA, Seattle, etc. are good places to be homeless. Boulder, CO is a good place to be homeless; they even put folks up in hotels in the winter for free when it is too cold outside.
Some people moved to these regions before being homeless, but they moved here for easy access to drugs and the overall drug climate (often not arrested or prosecuted for possession of hard drugs and pot is legal). This is sort of 'pre-homelessness'... their drug addiction was practically guaranteeing they would become homeless eventually.
BTW: Governments paying to bus their homeless people somewhere else so "it's not their problem" should be illegal unless tacitly agreement upon by the two regional/municipal governments. This practice is disgusting.
> They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle.
If you look up the amount spent per homeless person by SF on homelessness, you'll wonder how it is possible that they're giving away ONLY $1000 per month.
I've seen street interviews on Youtube or maybe Twitter where they come up to tourists and ask them how they're enjoying their trip and catch any feedback. Sad replies.
That's not new tho. The 'romantic' idea of travelling to the us always comes with the ugly taste of open poorness, public drug consumptions and general inhumane behaviour to their homeless and sick.
It's not only SF or Cali that has this image at this point. It's kinda hard to overlook when this simply does not exist where you are from.
Half the dysfunction with political efforts to ameliorate homelessness is the toxicity of touching a difficult issue. Homelessness is beyond any one term or individual to solve. Certainly you cannot cure the addictions, disabilities or madness of these unfortunate people overnight. The only solution people would actually like is if the homeless were to disappear.
These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern humanity.
They should either be forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast thrown away to some dark corner under a bridge or street.
In a way we don't disagree. I think citizens would be quite happy with a solution which makes the homeless invisible by sequestering them. Its probably also the best for the health of these people. But remember how we got here. Reagan shut down the asylums because they were expensive, messy and "inhumane". 20 years after reinstitutionalizing we will lament the cost of sedation and imprisonment.
California spent $4 billion a year on homelessness. Thats roughly $35,000 per homeless person (115,000).
IMO it shouldn't even that much to institutionalise/imprison/forcefully remove these people but even if it did cost as much or more, it would still be worth it.
Imagine what would clean safe streets do for these cities, it would create such a huge rebound!
Forget the fact that its whats the most liberal countries do, what else do you propose?
Whats draconian is the current state of affairs. Letting these people rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins here.
These people need help and those who don't need help are knowingly causing public harm. Public harm as in harming the public in the public spaces where the public pays ungodly amounts of taxes to keep them safe.
> I can solve it in under a year... forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
Yes, if you criminalize homelessness and imprison all the homeless in hospitals and prisons, I think you've technically solved homelessness. Your problem though is that to do so, you've gone full fascist, so now there's a new problem.
There is a huge difference between being homeless and choosing to camp on a public street in metropolitan areas.
Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they aren't mentally ill, you forcefully remove them to the outskirts of the city. If they still keep coming back then you imprison them.
If you think this is fascist, then you are dangerously loosening the definition of fascism. You must see how playing with these words like this is extremely dangerous? Does "the boy you cried wolf" ring a bell?
If you think forcibly concentrating groups of undesirables into camps isn’t a hallmark of fascism, I have to introduce you to the 20th century.
> If they aren't mentally ill
And what happens when the people making the decisions on whether or not someone is mentally ill are religious conservatives who believe homosexuality and transgenderism is a mental illness?
Are you aware that religious conservatives often call leftism a mental disorder? They call wokeism a “mind virus”.
Maybe you think you have a good idea here with your homeless concentration camps, but all I see is a back door to prosecution and persecution for people you just don’t like to see. Today that’s the homeless, and when they’re gone you’ll move on to the next group. First they came for the socialists…
Aren’t you just describing the modern prison system? I believe the fascism comes from doing it to non-criminals, or communism if you count china’s re-education camps. Also, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer war.
Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.
Sure, but other prison systems that are more humane also concentrate people in locations.
Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work.
And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab).
This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).
Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still).
Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant.
We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy.
You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.”
I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.
Ya, if someone is on the street mentally ill, or even abusing drugs as a user, but not doing crime, there is no moral reason to force them into rehab. Frankly, that isn’t really common for the visible homeless in our area (the ones that we notice because they are walking around without a shirt on with a bunch of Amazon packages in their cart, that isn’t counting the homeless we don’t notice because they aren’t doing crazy things). The crime is pretty bad ATM, which is wearing out a lot of empathy, so even Seattle will be back in a tough on crime cycle in an election or two, not that it will do much good.
Criminalization of homeless on the streets is effective in eliminating the problem locally if a more permissive jurisdiction is nearby: eg you can’t lay down on a bench in Bellevue WA without swat coming out to talk to you, and so it’s easier to just go across the lake to Seattle where you can pitch a tent in a public park and maybe the police will get around to evicting you a few months later. No need to fund special buses, people will get to where they can live on their own.
Sending people from expensive places to live to cheap places to live is a good idea in theory, if it were just about affordability. The problem is that they’ve completely mis-identified the crisis, that people came to the rich cities because the rich cities had the tax base (and sympathetic voter base) to support services for them. Rather than talk about shipping people around, however, it might be time to introduce an internal residency system (give up on allowing free movement if we are going to insist on using local resources to solve these problems).
And the resolution has been terrible. Politicians (and voters) pick a position. They act on it, or don't. But, nothing is ever planned executed at a scale where it is expected to solve or make a visible dent in the problem as a whole.
So maybe your "position" is "housing first." It's popular, backed by academia, and it goes ahead.
At this point, resource efficiency, overall scale of impact and such don't matter. The action is "housing first" or it's "community centred" or "drug-free," "Jesus saves" or whatever... and that's enough. Ideology>efficacy when you don't expect to get anywhere anyway.
These big, ideologically charged, "toxic" issues are such that no one expects to "solve" them. So, they act at the operational level spending whatever resources they have without real strategics. Strategy becomes replaced with abstractions.
first sane response - yes its a generational to multi generational problem. We are dealing with the outcome of decisions made long ago. There are now two issues: (1) all the currently homeless (2) the people in the pipeline to be homeless. The people homeless now require a completely different solution than the "pipeline" of people we need to help stay out of homelessness.
Unfortunately, politics is too short sighted to ever solve an issue that will truly take a decade+ of good policy to fix. And, as you mentioned, tackling the now problem is almost too toxic to touch, politically. Rock and a hard place.
I've heard it called the homelessness industrial complex, that was from some City Journal article someone posted to HN some years back that introduced me to that publication. It was a shocking thing to contemplate but yah with that sum of money what exactly do we have to show for it?
yah, and I can see this being true of any effort to remove something negative from society. What do you do next when satisfactorily eliminate it and how do you test when that negative thing has not sufficiently retreated for a given effort. How do you differentiate spinning wheels when someone doesn't want to advance and is intentionally idling burning the hours and when the problem is just downright difficult.
This same nonsense logic would apply to the police, firemen and nurses too. Are the firemen out there discouraging sprinkler systems because they want to keep their jobs?
Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical, purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the street.
All those other professions have preventative value. It is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters - the incentives are rightly aligned to make it temporary to keep down costs. Involving private outfits as contractors, just as with private prisons, skews the incentives terribly. (I also have nothing against private healthcare, security, or fire houses as a luxury spend for those who want it.)
This is an interesting concept I’d like to hear more of with this so called preventative value. Is this to say in their absence bigger troubles would show up so having their services prevents worse outcomes from sneaking up on us or something?
More or less. Otherwise you can get easily stuck arguing that any profession that fixes problems is untrustable for fabricating problems. E.g., doctors deliberately give us bad advice to keep us sick or overdiagnose so that they have more patients. (Okay, maybe chiropractors do this - hah!) But I think it's fairly safe to argue that employees of a system like nurses or cops - who are payed a salary regardless of how many "customers" they go through - are very different than the owners of private hospitals, prisons, or shelter operators whose profit incentives are directly aligned with funneling more people into the system, not at preventing or fixing anything.
that's an interesting point, I think for those professions theres sufficient quantity of a baseline demand that they don't need to artificially create demand. However it's not unprecedented, there was a crazy story a friend shared with me like 2 years ago I think. Something from this François Bonivard, Geneva Chronicles in the 1500s that details this doctor trying to contaminate his town to secure future plague patients. I tried to find the primary source but all I could locate was this odd website that happened to hit some of the text my friend emailed me https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=11047763. The original French text is in the archive however https://archive.org/details/leschroniquesde00bonigoog
A more modern example I recently stumbled across maybe 2 weeks ago was this crime story of this wicked nurse working in the ICU who was thrashing patients on his floor with air embolisms. The reason, the guy wanted to prolong the patients stay to ensure more overtime hours https://youtu.be/dgWcplHgAjU?t=645. Absolutely unbelievable.
You don't even need any sort of novel new technology. We could build housing out of wood just like we have for hundreds of years.
The main problem is that new housing is largely banned as established wealth that already have detached homes vote for politicians that promise to not allow any new homes near them.
With that level of money, you could hire lots of smart people to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem.
You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide data. And then you could use that money to implement small scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still have billions left over.
For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.
So where is that 5% on your bell curve in Rio De Janeiro? Or most of Europe? Or most parts of Asia?
Why is the 5% of people in the world who according to you are uncivilized concentrated in the U.S.?
Because homelessness of the sort that you see in the US simply doesn’t exist in most countries in the world. Both countries that are as rich or significantly poorer than the US.
This is not caused by some unprecedented economic crash or poverty crises. As I've said in the OP, "this is an epidemic of uninformed tolerance and apathy ravaging an entire nation."
These are either addicts, mentally ill or uncivilised people. Every society from the most liberal ones to the most tyrannical ones have set up laws and institutions to deal with them.
You forcefully institutionalise the mentally ill. You provide an option of voluntary treatment to addict or forced. You forcefully remove the uncivilised people.
I personally have stronger beliefs when it comes to what to do with these peoples but that will get me banned (its a little biblical).
What I'm talking about here is the humane/liberal option. The alternative is to let them rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins.
> These are uncivilised people (by definition), a lot of it is mental illness and the rest is refusal be a civilised human.
Spoken from a position of priviledge and perceived moral superiority. Where do you live, and how much do you earn? Have you ever considered what it would be like if you couldn't afford where you live, no matter how much you earn?
Cost of living has gone up but wages haven't. Minimum wage hasn't been adjusted in years, while rent & housing multiplied thanks to unfettered capitalism. I was lucky in that I managed to buy a house in 2017, but since then the prices have gone up and I would no longer be able to afford the house I live in were it to go on the market, despite my wage having gone up 50% or thereabouts.
It's a trite comment, but seriously, check your priviledge. A nontrivial percentage of the visitors of this website are homeless, couch surfing, live in a car, or pay more for a roof over their heads than they can actually afford.
I grew up around poor people. I remember watching my cousin cry to my aunt for money to buy pens/pencils whilst my aunt knew she didn't have the money nor did her husband working 12 hours on a pineapple plantation.
I have another uncle who threw away 15 years of his life being a truck driver in the deserts of Saudi Arabia just so that his son and daughter could get a decent education. Meanwhile his wife (my aunt) raised two kids alone, whilst herding goats, chickens and managing a rubber planation.
Don't talk to me about privilege. These people are scum. Low lifes. Not only do they have access to handouts (especially in europe), they have access to an infinite amount of jobs.
How do you think tens of thousand of UNSKILLED people cross the border illegally with no money, work low skilled jobs and make enough money not only to sustain themselves but also to send money back.
You have no idea how privileged and uninformed you are. All these stories I told is because of communism. We are from one of the most blessed regions in the world, rivaling california and florida in beauty but communism ruined my state. Now everybody above 90 IQ is forced to be flee the country.
Everybody I know including myself are expats. Nobody wants to leave but they have no choice, there is no future here. So yeh I would have unfettered capitalism over your delusional childish theories of good vs bad.
Side Note: price increased are due to inflation caused by the expansion of the money supply. Guess what expands the money supply? Also in central banking system, this expansion is done through the banking system creating massive bubbles and extreme money concentrations.
I've decided most homeless social programs are a trap. By locating these programs in the centers of the highest cost of living cities, we can't reasonably expect them to succeed, assuming success is actually getting people housed and back on their feet. We need to encourage people to move some place they have a chance in hell of getting out of poverty.
Centering these programs in rich city centers is a failed policy and needs to be scrapped.
In some cases, these are indirect corporate subsidies. After all, who will work in low-paying jobs in SF, if they have to live far far away?
Where could people move that would give them more opportunities? Rural areas often lack the social resources to support people in more precarious situations, and big cities is where the opportunities are.
Interesting idea, but do homeless folks actually end up working for corporations? They have a hard enough time getting any job in the first place (and remaining presentable enough for their job if they do get one)
Individual states cannot address most social issues, this is a known issue. This is why 101 issues like education and healthcare REQUIRE federal action.
My priors are that if the WSJ is making obviously BS headlines in the format "California spent <big number> on something. It failed" then California is likely half-heartedly doing the right thing and should do more of it.
And is likely saving money compared with whatever the WSJ is pushing as an alternative.
I know a lot of this discussion focuses on the Bay Area, but I live in central LA and the situation is totally out of control here as well. Needles, human feces, trash everywhere, people sleeping in front of storefronts.
Walking around parts of LA at night feels like you're in a neo-noir dystopian film. It's literally ghastly.
If you spend [big scary number] on a thing and it "doesn't work", absent some real analysis that just as much means you under spent as that you may have over spent.
It's like pointing at construction cranes in a rapidly growing city and saying, "look none of this new housing is working because rents keep going up!"
California and so many other regions have real unaddressed homelessness issues that have long, long been utterly ignored. It's more likely that we're insufficiently addressing the real scope of the issue.
Ironically, in my opinion, this comment here is the meta-level crux of it all. No matter how much money they throw at it, no matter how badly it fails, the proponents will always just double down and say that if only they spend more money next year, this time it would fix it. A year later when now there's even more homelessness, it's not because their policies failed, of course it's because they didn't tax you hard enough, and if only they had X amount of money this time they'd fix it. It's a never ending cycle.
But on the other side, the same accusation, people will reflexively and cynically throw up their hands and say "see it's not working" and give up, offering no real better solutions themselves other than they don't want to spend money.
If people point to clear, concrete, distinct problems that's one thing. But gesturing vaguely at "boy lots of money being spent here" that's another.
Living near the heart of an ongoing unresolved homelessness crisis my entire life the driving force I've seen, despite all the money being spent is 1) largely an insufficient status quo approach and 2) no actual better ideas from those opposed.
So in fact both sides are doing badly.
Regarding point 1 in my jurisdiction, despite all the money being spent, all the ribbons being cut on performative new social housing projects, you can add up the numbers of units and find that over the decades there's actually constantly net loss of housing, as whatever occasionally new is created is dominated by the old affordable units being destroyed.
Despite this clear and provable net loss in affordable housing and an ensuing obvious expected rise in homelessness, critics point out that we spent too much money on homelessness, offering no better solutions themselves but simply to spend less money. Of course if less money was spent, if less homes were created, the net loss of units would be even more extreme, and the amount of visible street homelessness would only increase further.
These [scary big number] amounts of spending sound like waste but more likely that they're just barely enough to band aid the wounds and prevent utter disaster.
The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, there's people Newsom appointed. Don't just get me riled up, tell me what's actually going on so that I can inform myself of how to fix this. Don't just say this is a problem and point a singular finger talking about large sums of money, break it down. Tell me why homeless decreased in SF and Orange but increased in LA, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego[0]. Tell me why it skyrocketed since 2016, starting with Brown and then accelerated under Newsom[1]. Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues that NY and CA aren't.
Do some investigation. Distill expert information to me. Be a news article, not a political ad.
Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)?
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.
If it is caused by other states, that would indicate the problem is not uniquely California related, making the likely necessary solutions to be federal.
If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate that the problem is something happening in California, and maybe a state level solution is best.
You have to start the solution in the right place to have any hope of addressing the root cause.
If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder it. And the federal government is just that, the collective power of all states combined.
Exactly. The logistics may not be simple (i.e. actually getting the federal government's support) but the logic should be obvious: piecemeal support results in the ones that are doing the most to help get "penalized" with more people seeking help.
So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.
The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.
California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.
What you describe is what happens in Canada.
Most homeless in Canada end up in Vancouver, because of weather and assistance offered. The other provinces, with the 6 months freezing winter, not as much assistance, and I think a bit of enforcement, causes the homeless to end up at Vancouver.
It’s a warm climate with large cities which provide sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless over other avenues of living
Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali over Canada for the winter. California also provides massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless
These aren’t exhaustive reasons why, but it’s a core part of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to address complicated social problems head on and instead virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester
I’m not going to provide you with sources. It’s too politicized of a subject. If you don’t want to accept it for being this way i’ve learned not to argue. But at the very least if people really can’t see why this problem exists as it does, here an entry
You think people choose to be fucked up?
And what's the solution here, shoot the homeless?
Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society, poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).
There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.
CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)
There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.
There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.
I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very much be net importing homeless from many of the other states that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading their homelessness problem).
I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.
Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).
>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).
I certainly agree that how you spend money could just encourage people to become homeless, I’d hoped to convey that idea by talking about percentage increases in the homeless population, since not every new homeless is going to be a transplant. I wish there were better guides as to what spending actually helps. I suspect soup kitchens are a general positive good, but they may only make it easier to be homeless by allieviating some of the pain. I personally think access to housing should be a basic constitutional right, but I’m also weary of things like projects and tenements which may purpetuate more problems than they help.
But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.
Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/
In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And considering the obvious issue of California being one of the most expensive places to live on the continent, it seems like quite a stretch.
There is an important phrase in economics, “all other things being equal”. That phrase covers the idea that if you chose another state that was equally expensive as california, and was equavalent in every other aspect, then this one difference would have this expected effect. You are correct that I don’t have emperical evidence to cite, and it would be a very very difficult experiment to run on a state level. But economists definitely try to run these kinds of experiments trying to find as similar as possible locals to try to answer the kinds of questions as “do changes in spending attract things that the money are spent on?”.
Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.
As others have pointed out, the problem has many sources. Other states/cities busing their homeless to California has historically been at least a minor contributor. California won a suit against the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, for specifically the practice of closing a psychiatric hospital, placing its freshly unhoused patients on Greyhound buses to Sacramento or San Francisco with one-way tickets, and giving the patients instructions to "call 911" when they arrive. [1]. 24 persons were documented and cared for by San Francisco specifically, but allegedly Nevada's largest mental health hospital did this with approximately 500 people.
Real data is not fashionable anymore to report. Same in health care and education. Tell me where all the f...ing money goes and why it's going up all the time. Don't single out one bad player but provide a full breakdown. That's what journalists should be doing.
Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll most likely find what you're looking for...
Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.
Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.
This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".
Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.
Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.
I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much less on the problem.
The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts and distorting them into untruths.
We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.
I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.
I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it.
Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals
They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.
My family and I were having a chaotic political argument about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk about a specific event or general ideas about what should happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000 miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things should be in the abstract.
Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.
I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.
You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do the digging and track why they're homeless, what they have done (and what has been done to them), look at program projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have gone up, some aren't, but there's tons of data (and governments are probably already tracking major portions of it).
Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.
17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.
It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places-- what is their sampling methods, etc?
I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.
Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you can’t fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.
> I’ll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
Wrong.
The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.
You’ve correctly identified the issues with media today. Rage inducing articles are easier to read and get more views. As soon as you introduce facts then very quickly it becomes a nuanced debate on the issue which is far less interesting because and worth less revenue.
We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material.
I don’t know what those regulations would look like. But without them we are drowning in material that does society more harm than good.
Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a panel where people could ask them questions. I asked them, given that journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why does the business model instead align on advertising?
The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.
Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:
1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.
2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.
And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.
Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.
So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.
The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.
I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures.
As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.
We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.
Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.
Or, hear me out, make similar comments as mine and use your economic leverage. We've been trying to push for regulations and stuff for decades, it hasn't been working. I'm not saying stop, I'm saying that the strategy needs to be rethought.
Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can have politics about things that you know about, anything less is tribalism.
You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight nor are you going to be able to march into the president's office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This is the power you have at the individual level. You are part of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is all connected.
Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy. Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or they censor. Both are effective.
Texas and Oklahoma openly bus their homeless to L.A. Rick Perry (former governor of Texas) openly bragged about it during his presidential campaign.
An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority coming from Texas.
Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was homeless upon arrival.)
L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
I don’t know how relevant this story is to the question of whether people who are homeless in California are from California.
In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.
If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.
When even the LAT is calling out LAHSA's numbers, you know that they can't be trusted...
That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.
How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population?
It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.
It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.
Define nice weather.
If we are talking winters with temperatures consistently over 0C (32F), little to no snow, seattle and portland are great for winter.
Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.
I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be.
I'm not first-hand familiar with Oregon, but some parts of Washington have moderate temps. Coastal Washington gets a lot of rain but rarely freezes and -- anecdotally -- at least one city in Coastal Washington has vastly worse rates of homelessness on a per capita basis than some of the cities infamous for it, like Seattle and SF. And, yes, they are mostly camped outside, not in shelters.
Which city? I was in Spokane recently (obviously not the coastal city you are speaking about) and was surprised by how full of homeless people downtown was.
The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.
West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.
East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.
In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.
It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.
Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain. Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up in the fall.
West coast winters are very mild, and there is very little humidity. We had a few days that got below freezing last year, most days were over 40.
If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)
The coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has mild weather all year, better than many parts of California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit in a rain shadow.
If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.
West of the Cascades, it's mild. To the east of them the climate is decidedly less mild, though, so I'd be interested to see how the numbers would compare between the two regions.
Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.
I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.
Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.
The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?
There are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.
I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.
> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]
I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.
But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.
Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.
The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable.
The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.
So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.
That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
> These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.
You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."
And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?
Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction.
Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.
If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people.
You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.
There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem.
The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.
15% of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. That statistic means almost 1 in 5 right off the top need long term medical care. "Mere housing" won't do jack for those people.
Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.
We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.
We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.
We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.
The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.
If it was just a matter of house prices, why isn't California's homelessness solved by cheaper homes in Fresno or other parts of the state? I can't help but feel there's more to it than cheaper housing.
I think the fallacy you're making is assuming all homeless have the same problems. There are definitely some homeless or near-homeless people where having a safe place to sleep, shower, and store their belongings will allow them to hold a job long enough to get back on their feet. There are others that need serious rehab. There are others that need mental health counseling. There are others that will never be able to care for themselves and need to be put in a care home.
So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.
It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build.
Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:
Where do you put them?
For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).
So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.
But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.
And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.
And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.
Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.
I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc).
It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex.
It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?
San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.
I think this is a misleading description of the situation.
Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.
> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.
> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”
I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city.
Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.
Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.
You think it's reasonable to think they imprisoned people in hotel rooms? You are also willing to take some "advocates" word for it? How about you provide evidence it did happen. It certainly did not. And what does that mean the majority were able to exit into long term housing? Having a bunched of wrecked property and then moving people to new property to destroy is not a success.
They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.
California has a housing crisis and there is no political will to fix it. Not wanting low cost housing in your neighborhood is something that unites people very strongly across the political spectrum.
The implication that there is a Boogeyman political system that doesn't want to house the homeless in their neighborhood is suspect and laughter inducing. Politicians need the will of the people to persist.
It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.
> Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues ...
Wait, what?
Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.
ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).
I think you are equating the fact that most elected officials in CA are Democratic to this being a political hit piece. With that logic, is anything negative about our largely Democrat body of officials off limits?
- Good climate: Absolutely. It's much tougher being homeless in the winter in Chicago than it is in California.
- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.
- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]
- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.
- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?
Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.
Not you, haha, I meant if weed is the only thing a police officer can find then it feels like a false pretense for arrest. I liked your response tbh, I didn’t catch what you mentioned initially.
Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given that California is essentially governed by a single party, it is subject to corruption and inefficiency.
Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1].
All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is not homeless.
We need viable political choices with incentives to compete on something other than alienating voters who would be expected to vote for the other side for accountability (which mostly means we need proportional representation.)
That is not the same as needing the opposing party in America’s duopolistic system.
Well, responsibility is what you get when you're in charge. It's axiomatically correct even if it isn't necessarily helpful (in the sense that there's no guarantee that a counterfactual republican California would have done any better).
This is my fear for the country as well as the republicans are (in my opinion you can disagree) at the very least partially going crazy. We desperately need at least two parties working for a good government. California needs more checks and balances, and so does the country.
> Given that California is essentially governed by a single party
Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.
> All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why.
Who: landowners.
How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and then using rent to capture money that should be going to said working class via wages and welfare.
Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and have the political influence to make it happen.
Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much overnight.
LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point, and it's regressive. Throw in some 0% base rate progressive income taxes, pigouvian taxes, maybe a small vat and you're on the right track.
> LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point
The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.
> and it's regressive
It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).
Meanwhile:
> VAT
That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.
With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.
Yes, but the vast majority of that equity is in the house itself, not in the land underneath it. On top of that, land in the suburbs is not as valuable as, say, land in Downtown (which is a big part of why the house itself is most of the value of a typical home).
> Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land.
Maybe not directly, but indirectly the vast majority of their wealth boils down to land. Every skyscraper, every warehouse, every factory, every mall, all those consume large swaths of typically-valuable land. In short:
> LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.
It would mostly fall on whomever owns the most land value - and that is overwhelmingly massive corporations and rich people. A middle class homeowner owns a tiny amount of land value in comparison - certainly far below their equal share, and therein lies the rub: 100% LVT disbursed directly, evenly, and entirely as UBI serves as a self-balancing system:
- If you own less land value than your equal share, you're paid for it
- If you own more land value than your equal share, you pay for it
That's purely theoretical (it's kind of the spherical frictionless cow of Georgist economics), but it should nonetheless illustrate that homeowners will in the vast majority of cases come out vastly ahead under LVT+UBI. Put simply: unless you own a single-family home in Downtown SF, replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT and getting back any surplus as UBI is in your best financial interest.
A really good and fair story about the problems, including problems with government, law enforcement, neighbors and the unhoused themselves is "City of Tents"
Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]
But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl in the populace. [1][2]
So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie. chronic) homelessness.
The chronically homeless I encounter in SF are primarily (not all) 1. Addicted to drugs 2. Suffering from psychiatric issues. No amount of affordable housing is going to fix that. No amount of training, educational assistance, universal income etc will fix that. They are not in any condition to work or hold a job or do personal health maintenance. Give them shelter and they wonder off.
Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes are being spent on housing. These are people that are not homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor. Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing."{1}
Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population relative to the rest of the country.
The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to promote them and receive money for them despite their inability to get results. That is were all the money goes.
> California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in,
Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless problem to other states and also do so figuratively by criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.
If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to your state, all other things being equal.
This isn’t, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that California has some very successful industries that reward a narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both not adequately increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity better for the general good.)
[0] Not simple policy problems to resolve, the housing one for political reasons, the improving distribution without killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.
All these detailed, complicated arguments. Why is homelessness not the same level of problem in the UK? Maybe think about that then consider why it's such an issue in the US.
You can get high on fentanyl ~$1 USD ... there is no stopping a sedative crisis at these prices. It's effectively a reverse Opium War consuming lives and our communities.
These two accounts have provided a gripping POV of this utter humanitarian crisis in SF:
The number of homeless people in California grew about 50% between 2014 and 2022. The state, which accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless, an estimated 115,000 people
More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high percentage of the chronically homeless who likely skew those stats pretty badly.
My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
Edit: In case it needs to be said again, the primary root cause is a nationwide shortage of appropriate housing options.
That’s about what happens in Canada, Vancouver gets the homeless fromt he entire country, sometimes bussed, but mostly because the climate is hospitable all year round
> My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
There's probably some truth to the idea that other places have exported their homelessness problems to San Francisco, but I think you're overblowing it here. Homelessness is a really complicated problem that I doubt has simple causes and solutions.
I do however agree that this is a national issue. I think places like New York and Boston are likely to see significantly worse homelessness themselves over the next decade.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 373 ms ] threadIt's a service. The state/city that provides the best service for homeless people - that's where I will try to go if I don't have a home.
Politicians don't seem to understand this. Or maybe they do, but they do the wrong thing in order to drum up politically correct votes.
Take San Francisco. It spends $400m on homeless each year. With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved. Are you homeless? Make your way to San Francisco. The tax payers in the city will buy you a home in Idaho - no questions asked.
The problem is that people become homeless due to a number of reasons that include addiction, mental illness, trauma, loss of work, etc. It’s not going to be solved by JUST providing them an apartment. At least not for everyone.
There couldn’t be a more significant difference between the homeless populations in places like SF and in other cities in the US with more sensible policies. There’s massively more people in California who are there because they’re voluntarily opting into a lifestyle where all of their capital expenditures are provided by taxpayers and they don’t have to do anything to maintain them other than to remain homeless. Many of these people may seem insane due to their drug use but their mental issues are a result, not a cause; they’re still rational actors responding to a perverse set of incentives.
- "when I was drug addicted you gave me cash"
- "when I was stealing to fund my addictions, you made shop lifting legal for stolen items amounting to $1000 or less"
- "when I was making violent threats, and assaulting members of the public you let me walk free"
- "when the police tried to intervene you said they were systematically racist against people of color and should be defunded"
- "when I had mental health issues, you closed down all the mental hospitals because you said they were oppressive institutions"
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Wasn't that Reagan? Don't think that he was on the left.
It at least keeps people alive. The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.
It may well keep people alive - in a way, but it's no solution if it creates a mass of people who are destroying themselves and the city community.
It's still death - just in slow motion.
> The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.
Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative solutions are required.
And which ones, bar building housing, should that be?
Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home (or being judged too unworthy of credit by three ultra-large black box corporations) is inhumane and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
But we should lock them up for the crime of doing crime: dealing drugs, drunk and disorderly, assault, robbery, theft etc.
> and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
The cut-price solution is clearly no solution at all.
> Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
These people meed help, and a drug-free environment is a place they can receive that help.
> And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
There are other places where some of these people (the ones without crippling mental health issues) stand a far better chance of building a stable life for themselves
Also known as life.
Source: https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...
Everyone knows, in the lyrics of Leonard Cohen -
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes Everybody knows
Anyhow the main problem with the Idaho idea, beyond the politics/optics: what about getting the homeless into jobs? I don't think Idaho is overflowing with those, and I expect some of the homeless will be better off of employed.
The logical (and operative) end of this thought process is "make them miserable and they'll leave."
Some/many politicians do implement these kinds of policies, but you'll rarely hear the quite part out loud.
Nasty problems breed dishonesty. Humane homeless policies increases homelessness, and the visibility of homelessness... especially if homeless migration is prevalent.
The inhumane homelessness reduction policy is "abuse homeless people, then some will go away" No one wants to admit the other side of whatever coin they like. C'est la politique.
This can't be solved at a local or state level in a country with unrestricted freedom of movement.
SF and similar CA cities have set up a program that encourages people to move there because it makes being “homeless” an actual possible lifestyle choice. Even an enjoyable one.
For those in more of a poverty trap situation, Finland has done quite a good job finding the right set of policies for their country to bring levels down so far that most Americans would consider them to have “solved” homelessness.[1]
https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-...
Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America
https://shelterforce.org/2004/05/01/reagans-legacy-homelessn...
Any program by any state that helps the homeless in a country where you legally cannot create state level borders (and with the homeless you can’t establish residency by definition) would immediately draw homeless people across the country, especially since the homeless strategy in many states is to pay for one way bus tickets to a different state, and quickly overwhelm and undermine what could otherwise have been a successful program.
Any successful program must be funded and implemented at the Federal level.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I don't think you're correct.
Perhaps I am not correct, but what do you think will happen in a few years when we will have a 100 GB neural model able to drive any car in any environment, effectively obliterating 200+ million jobs worldwide? Fairly certain, if we keep the same policies and the same belief-system, homelessness will trend rather high.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
[2] 2018, Abdullah Al-Beraidi, "The Trap of Neoliberalism for Gulf Cooperation Council Countries", https://online.ucpress.edu/caa/article-abstract/11/4/63/2579... PDF: https://caus.org.lb/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Trap-of-N...
It is actually one of the few groups I've found that are worse than the socialist class reductionists, who think that every problem exists "because capitalism".
Yes, a land value tax can be a useful policy. But it simply has little relevance to the topic of people who are homeless because of mental issues.
And you bringing up georgism demonstrates a lack of engagement on the issue, and instead an attempt to shoe horn in your favorite ideology into any possible issue.
Homelessness is primarily a function of housing costs, so I'd suggest the land value tax is a lot more relevant than you think.
Just buy all the homeless people bus tickets to somewhere cheap in the middle of nowhere and pay the cheap rent for them there.
Problem solved. And easily solvable using the existing over inflated costs we pay now.
We, of course, don't do that, because it isn't going to solve the problem.
People could be paid to move or otherwise offered lots of benefits and best quality of life opportunities to do so. And paying people to move would be much cheaper than the amount of money we spend now on the problem to overpay for stuff in expensive cities.
The actual reason why we don't do this easy solution, is because home prices arent the sole cause of homelessness.
Simply doing the voluntary, cheap, and easy solution of giving people the voluntary choice to live in a much higher quality home in a low cost of living area simply wouldn't solve the issue.
I just can't wait for the full consequences of automated statistics-based decision-making to develop into realtime embedded robotics, giving rise to the $100 trillion company, evaporating hundreds of millions of jobs, burning down the world as it is, but at least silencing these squeaky, visionless voices: fiat lucrum, et pereat mundus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism#:~:text=Georgism%20is....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti...
That's what I just said.
But, the fact remains, that if you add a land value tax this doesn't do much to help the person who is homeless because of mental health issues.
55% of homeless were not mentally ill in January 2015 in "the most extensive survey ever undertaken" [1]. Not having a singular worldview is one query away.
[1] https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mental...
Thats my point though. That someone's buzzword ideology or singular solution isn't particularly relevant to this discussion, and that Georgists are the worst of the bunch.
Its actually the only group worse than the internet socialists who just blame "capitalism" for everything.
And georgism is actually worse in that it takes a single topic, that of "land" and just attempts to shoehorn that one concept into everything.
> the Georgist word land abstracts away
Oh thats exactly my point! They take one single word, from an ideology of that was outdated even 100 years ago, and pretend like it applies to every single problem.
What if, instead of that, not everything has to do with "land"? Maybe, different problems are solved by different things and we don't have to stress the definition of the word "land" to apply to literally every single problem.
You just hate operator overloading, I understand. Hope you don't write much C++.
I do have a tendency to overload solutions, since there are so many problems. For instance, just to give you something more to kick, I believe all democratic issues would be solved by three changes in the electoral process:
(i) no political nominations, instead have a population-wide lottery, arbitrarily selecting 10 or so people as contenders [1]; (the principle behind: power should belong to those who do not want it)
(ii) to be able to vote "No", invalidating all the candidates, if majority vote, reducing the mandate duration, if not; (the principle behind: you are not free if you cannot say "No")
(iii) tie the mandate duration to the voter turnout: if only 60% vote, you get 60% of the duration of the mandate, not 100%. (the principle behind: politicians are better if they are changed often)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
For China: "When the poverty headcount dropped below 10 percent of the rural population, targeted poverty alleviation and social protection systems started playing a more important role." [2], how neoliberal of them.
Meanwhile, "more than 800 million Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand" [3], who needs oxygen anyway.
[1] Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar... one of the main reasons for India's poverty reduction, "415 million people exited multidimensional poverty in the country in 15 years between 2005-06 and 2019-21", https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/india-lifted...
[2] "Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China: Drivers, Insights for the World, and the Way Ahead", https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea..., p. 65
[3] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/alm...
It seems like it'd be politically palatable to allow places to run homeless programs that are only available to locals. There isn't a downside for anyone.
How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
> How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
I'm not sure what point you're wanting to make here, but yes. If a group of locals wants to solve homelessness in their area they will need to decide on answers to those questions. Frankly they aren't hard questions. Born in a geographic area or owned a home for 5+ years, yes, no, yes if they owned a home locally.
How do define who gets to be a citizen for a federal response to homelessness? It faces exactly the same problems. America can't afford to provide welfare for all of Asia.
First, homeless people tend to be much less likely to have the wherewithal to prove residency, either due to substance problems, difficulty navigating bureaucracy, or just not having the money to chase down paperwork or a safe place to store it. So hurdles like "being local", essentially whatever it means, could prove to be a huge barrier to uptake of your programs.
Second, "solving homelessness" for just one subset of homeless people may not actually provide the benefit you hope for. You might still have tent cities, RV encampments, people using drugs outdoors, etc. Now the people doing that are from just past city limits and entitled to no support.
Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
90% of families in China own their own home
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/
Will never happen here though.
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Try sleeping outside for a year in Phoenix or in Minneapolis. Try getting resources in a sprawling suburb without access to a car. It seems clear that SF, with its dense, walkable layout, access to public transit, and year round moderate climate, would be vastly preferable to most areas of the US.
How many are from California and how many were given a bus pass to California by a government content to move the homeless around or on their own accord made their way to California as it has some of the best services?
How many are the same homeless people and how many are new homeless people who have replaced the old homeless people, making it appear that no progress has been made, but in reality there may just be greater need?
I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in addressing the housing market; which in California is really really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws) but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way Austria has controlled rent prices (though californians might not like the fact that around 70% of housing in austria is limited or non profit).
Also, this is a US-wide problem. California just has the best weather and open doors. But I doubt it's going to get better, wealth inequality does nothing but increase in the US. We'll see, but this looks to me more of a symptom than a sickness in itself.
And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to everyone at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to long-term unemployed. I'm not sure how well that'd go with American sensibilities.
¹: https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-wohnungspo...
Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue?
If its actually important, you might need to do more than voting, which is the minimum effort democratic engagement.
Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, economic whatnots, etc.
The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a long time. This caused both high end investors and relative laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market, and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up anything.
Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and employers have been getting away with tightening the thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed to.
Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass migrations; people can't live where there's no water.
There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks and there's no quick fix.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at the same time the housing market is like a big factory that produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of assistance that can be brought to bear.
Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to property prices and rents and thats the last thing investors want.
They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see people dying on the street than that, but theyre not comfortable admitting it.
Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda anything except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing construction.
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Everyone has different preferences and ideas there, but the shortage is so, so damaging right now in so many ways.
Single family home owners are the people who oppose density with their entire being. I hear them cry about traffic, parking, their view, noise, about their neighborhood's character. That regime is the problem.
If it is profitable I will build housing all day long. If you cap rents and require unprofitable units to be built, I can't build as much. Then you are left competing for the finite supply of single family homes. Good luck!
My property has rent control. Two 600 dollar a month units. Unprofitable. No way to get those to market so I Ellis act the whole thing. Good work rent control, you just made a 4 unit building into a single family home.
Now there are some more regulations that disincentivize rebuilding by requiring unprofitable units or restoring the previous rental level. Great, let's delay building +10 units for a decade.
These controls are so hair brained and only make the situation worse. You don't need social housing, you just need to get out of the way of the market.
The fastest rate of home building was in New York during the 1950s. The strictest rent controls were in New York in the 1950s.
The slowest is today when rent controls are weakest.
It's not that it doesn't have an effect, but it is small and is absolutely overwhelmed by the lowering of property taxes. When property taxes are low, even the shittiest units making the most inefficient use of land like yours can tick over making a small profit and this eats land which would otherwise be used to build denser housing.
Lowered property taxes also kicked property values sky high which in turn led to the NIMBY revolution. This also inhibited home building in a massive, massive way.
In order to fix the housing crisis landlords who use land inefficiently to start losing money in a big way. That way they will finally dump their properties and the land can be redeveloped efficiently.
They must be subjected to market discipline otherwise the housing market will never be fixed. The velvet glove treatment of their rent entitlements is entirely unsustainable.
My property is going from 4 units to a personal residence due to rent control. It is unprofitable. It is not being developed further despite that being my initial plan because those restrictions would carry over to the new units (SB 8). You will never convince me these programs are good. They are literally taking housing off the market.
This is zoned for 14 units. I will sit on it for 10 years due to SB 8. Great policy to prevent housing development.
There are already small towns across the US where homes are ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in fact people are moving out.
If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply.
Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up probably would.
They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle.
I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash. There’s no other conclusion to reach about how policy makers truly think about this class of people with the way the incentives of these “support” programs are structured.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
I don’t have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue for fewer rules, not more. So I’d like to understand your point better.
Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people.
For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.
There are plenty of homeless people who are in a poverty trap, as you describe, but I think it oversimplifies the situation to argue the arrow of causality only goes one direction for all homeless people.
I think over-complication is the issue in the states, which in turn makes a lot of these grants go to heads thinking about the issues rather than the actual issues.
I also think it is important to attribute issues where they are due: Mental issues is not a housing problem, it is a health care issue. Not being able to manage money is not a housing problem, it is a primary school problem. Etc.
With all respect for your previous life, it does sound like you needed some quality health care more than a parental system that handed out food stamps (in fear that the money otherwise would have gone to drugs).
SF is a ridiculously expensive city that people from across the US consider (who have homes even) consider themselves priced out of.
It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).
Constructing that suburb would create jobs. The infrastructure needed to maintain it would create jobs. And even if it remains a net cash drain, it'll still likely be cheaper than 17B a year while giving people actual homes with opportunities to work their way up and out
The problem is that many homeless people would genuinely rather live on the streets or in shelters in the city proper where they have easy access to the things they want, versus having a house provided elsewhere.
They want housing near their preferred begging spots and their dealers, basically.
To take an unpopular example: Iran
Iran provides food and shelter to all it's citizens, making sure everyone has their minimum needs met. They've combined this with strict laws against begging. If they see anyone begging on the street someone will come up to them and ask "Why are you begging? Do you have some basic need that's still unmet?"
Outcomes will range from: - Helping them with that need (if it's legitimate) - Directing them to getting some kind of job if they merely want more income (even if it's selling trivial knick knacks on the street) - Presumably there's penalties for repeat offenders
Source: Iranian.
I am not opposing that they are statistically related. But it is not OK to assume that people are drug addicts when they tell that they are homeless. That is normal human decency.
But the subject isn't addicts, it's homeless people. Not all homeless people are addicts, and not all addicts are homeless.
Families are the fastest growing homeless demographic.
Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy.
It gives you some useful tricks, though. E.g. if somebody complains about the chronically homeless addicts assaulting people downtown? Why, you just point out that X% of "the homeless" are actually just regular non-addicted people temporarily down on their luck, who just need a free hotel room for a couple weeks.
But ya, most people won’t notice, since they didn’t notice these people before.
Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because usually at the top of the list is "drugs".
There other services provided en-masse for homeless people with addiction problems but you can't force them to take advantage of them.
The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the recipients addiction the hope is to address a symptom and prevent people with addiction problems from committing crimes to fuel their habits.
What I am against is a totally unstructured program where they hand cash out knowing that 90% of it goes into an open air drug market that they make no attempt to shut down or control.
I’m not arguing for work requirements or time limits. People who are legitimately struggling will fall through the cracks. But I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance and be put on a pathway to supportive housing.
> I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work
Sorry if I'm missing something, but aren't these directly antithetical?
There definitely needs to be case workers or someone involved to help provide these people a path to recovery.
This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the homelessness problem.
Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work requirements is not simple. And I think you need some evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.
Like when world bank lend money to country that are bankrupted, they ask them to take the money for reform and try to improve their economy, same should happen here.
If access to money is not their actual impediment then you may be making their situation worse.
> I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?
> argue for fewer rules
Judging by living in the middle of this policy. The number of homeless has increased and the number of open air drug markets, prostitution, and suicides have increased with them. There is a concerted _lack_ of enforcement of rules. The homeless purchase RVs from scrap yards, move them onto the sides of streets, and live in them.
Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. And our response is just.. "here's $1000 and a legal carte blanche for anything short of murder."
It's not working.
One of the most under appreciated aspects of this is that the current policies actually hurt the homeless people who are stuck in a poverty trap and want to get out. They have to live daily with an ever increasing number of people who are allowed to engage in dangerous and uncivil behaviour. There are parents and children on the streets who want nothing more than to get off them - but until that happens, their quality of life has been made considerably worse by the policies presently in place.
What if we apply your logic to your own scenario?
You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
> You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the water will spit them out if you pay it.
And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make your problem worse. That $1000 might as well be considered a pile of drugs or booze.
When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they realized they were just getting pawned.
I jump in and help you to shore.
You immediately jump back in and start drowning again.
Someone else helps you to shore
You jump back in and start drowning again.
Eventually everyone who would help you wants some kind of evidence that this time you won't just jump back in before they help you.
You drown.
Are you saying they should have done more?
We've tried putting a "fence" around drugs, it doesn't work.
And we've decided that putting a "fence" around addicts (aka prison) is wrong.
So it seems like we really don't have options.
The real analogy would be that you have to consent to the would-be savior to verify you are actually drowning. Im not sure anyone drowing would think “no thanks ill take my chances”.
How do you pay to enforce all of this? Do jails have adequate space? Are there enough judges, courtrooms, and public defender's to handle this efficiently? Where should the children go?
"It's not working"
What are your suggestions for aiding people to be able to afford rent and sustaining themselves?
Well if you cant enforce it and jails don’t have adequate space shouldn’t you put more resources to those things? Or do you not actually think it should be enforced nor should people be put in jail?
I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing. However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely point to a study validating the effectiveness of it, because the reality of means-testing is that it: a) Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost efficient b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people who need help behind c) Tends to create poverty traps and weird distorting incentives.
I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the impact on society as a whole. This is a separate discussion.
In reality though, I think most people on both sides think of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one of two solutions to these issues: 1) Making it difficult for those who are unhoused. 2) Trying to improve the situation of those who are unhoused.
The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it with cities and towns busing their homeless to other places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the problem nationally become worse.
On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid on the core issue.
The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and unfortunately this is an area which California has struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the same time.
Source?
Because this seems to be banded around in comments without anyone sourcing.
I dropped this actual source [1] in another comment, that measures 13% of unsheltered homeless as coming from out of state for LA.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...
That said, you don’t think even 1 in 9 people being out of staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see how you can migrate and live far more easily than in Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won’t increase? That there isn’t a negative psychic impact to homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the system having to live around many others who are content to collect their scrip?
I’m skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who both originate from within, and outside, California.
Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you are arguing with that imaginary person.
Meanwhile a single sharp person who lives in a city and interacts with the right intersection of people will tell you closer to the truth than even the better quality studies or media outlets. To think otherwise is imo foolish.
Exactly what I expect from HN's crowd.
That you seemingly missed the caveat that I mentioned about “hard sciences” also not a good sign.
More likely you don’t want it to be true.
EDIT: I might be thinking of a different study, because going to that link shows that 65% were in LA county for 20 years supposedly: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...
I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that information. If they used county records, it's a very different trust paradigm than if they just asked.
It’s a very different situation than being homeless in cities with more typical seasonal weather patterns; I nearly lost a number of toes due to frostbite when I was homeless in Saint Louis during a major blizzard. San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.
Of course they don't. Living out of a tent on a street makes it extremely hard to get your life onto target for rejoining the economically healthy portion of society. I'm sure you know that. I don't know what you were trying to say.
As a long-time participant in the bay area rental housing market, $1000 is enough to rent a bedroom in many homes, but how would such a listing get onto apartments.com?
If you’re paying more than $1000 to share a bedroom, you’re getting ripped off.
Check Craigslist, that’s the main place people who are looking for randoms to rent a room will post:
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=1000&min_p...
Of course, most people would prefer to room with family or friends (especially if we’re talking about multiple people in the same room). That’s not an SF issue, it’s human nature. So a lot of roommate groups are going to be formed through word-of-mouth, or smaller community group chats/boards.
Check how long those apartments have been listed for, some of them have been listed for a year. If it's an actual competitive price it will get rented immediately.
There are shared housing groups on facebook that will reflect the situation more accurately.
They need treatment and in many cases it might need to be compelled to break the cycle. This then needs to be followed with integration programs (and jobs, schooling) that do not happen in the same area where they spent their time addicted.
Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada.
When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and that we should give them (the users and the NGOs) money and safe-supply drug and leave them alone on the street.
But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).
(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).
>In the City of Vancouver’s 2019 homeless count, based on those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.
Where is the data backing up your claim?
If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became homeless, which is the data to match the claim ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there").
[1] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...
If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you weren't financially stable to begin with.
EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them regardless of where they came from.
This might shock you, but the majority of people right now are not financially stable.
Where are you getting this from?
But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.
Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:
- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime
- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits
- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here
Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."
At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
https://sfstandard.com/public-health/san-francisco-homeless-...
But I'm skeptical of those data, because:
1. The data are from folks with an agenda:
- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)
2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.
- tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)
- utility bill payments
- high school graduation (or even enrollment) records
- rent receipts or rental contracts
I'm not saying all of those are required. But if the data come from a biased source (like one whose existence or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are all from out of town), then it's hard to accept it when absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.
I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence. Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with addressing the problem of homelessness?
This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I would encourage you to download and read the original homeless census report.
A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not really from SF, even if they technically become homeless while living in SF.
Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.
But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.
I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.
These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also have their own homeless issues. I don't think their municipal gov would be open to the province providing relocation resources to these people.
Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.
Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them exit first.
This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15% number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45% number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're measuring.
See e.g. http://allhomekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Updated-7.11...
Edit: not to mention that these studies are all surveys and this political issue is pretty well known, so there is a strong incentive to lie.
Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.
I don't know if modern institutions could be better. However we know they failed in the past. If you want to propose them again, you need to provide some proof that they new ones will be better than the old.
Well, I'm glad someone is because everyone else seems to be worse off as a result
Fortunately mass incarceration and just doing nothing aren't the only two options.
This is underreported to a criminal degree.
Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the first place.
We couldn't keep a roof over the head of a schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or stipends available to renovate your own home to the security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike problematic foster children, there is no state agency that pretends to have your back in this endeavor. Meanwhile you're cohabitating with someone regularly insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and occasionally molesting your family members, which does wonders for their mental health. Normally your entire family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the Rules of Society about as well as the criminal population. So in failing to solve one problem, you create five more.
Even more fun in California, since they become tenants of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the savvy ones will shake you down when you try to [unlawfully] evict them.
This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which is the same argument that has been made to excuse criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle either group.
The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and vote for any politician that offers a solution. The politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves and their NGO/developer friends (more money for more housing!), while not actually addressing the problem of homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians who seek to keep them locked into their destructive lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are given de facto permission to continue harassing regular people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from shops, wander through working class neighborhoods screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians who profit from it.
The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking around and trying to reform local politics.
You'd want to see evidence of incredible effectiveness to be willing to engage in something like that, but the evidence just isn't there: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095539591...
> Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms. Given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.
Note that this systematic review looked at compulsory treatment methods besides just detox, but none of the results were that impressive.
Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy. In general people tend to react very badly when their body autonomy is violated: the results are trauma, CPTSD, suicide. I suggest we try other solutions first, starting from a place of compassion, empathy and scientifically tested medical advice.
Like detox centers, which exist to minimize trauma, suicide, and CPTSD.
> Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy.
Giving an addict a steady supply of money often just kills them (like my sister). I consider that some sort of violation. As is, letting addicts do drugs might sort itself out [1]. I imagine 2022-2023 numbers will be very very depressing.
[1] https://www.nist.gov/image/drug-overdose-deaths-chart-0
My least favorite part of this was the local media pretended this wasn't true. They pretended it vociferously despite this being such an obvious lie.
Previous discussions on HN suggest that the official stats are misleading and, for example, will count one as "local" if their last official street address was time in a local prison.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co...
By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless population "became homeless while living in SF."
Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10 years at the time of the census (the agency only has buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect the amount of time the person lived in SF before becoming homeless).
So, although they may have technically "become homeless while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years since they first got here, including time while homeless). Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25 when they first became homeless.
When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years).
It's probably even lower when you consider that the current episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only marginally housed when arriving).
Only 17% reported being in SF for less than a year, what are you talking about?
> as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years
ahahaha oh okay you are insane.
Oh, looks like you forgot to add the 28% who were already experiencing homelessness when they arrived in SF. I’m sure that’s just an honest mistake.
> ahahaha oh okay you are insane.
So you believe that a homeless person who has lived in SF for 13 months, total, at the time they were surveyed is “from SF”? I’m not the one who created the reporting buckets.
I’m happy to change my mind given new data, but a person who has lived in a city for 1-10 years is not “from” that city. Maybe you should ask SF’s homeless census to report in more gradual buckets.
I visited the Bay Area a number of times and only met one person who was born locally. "Not even Americans!" in many cases.
Take in consideration that homeless folks are under no obligation to tell the truth when surveyed or questioned and are generally aware that "migration of homeless into certain areas" is a hot-button issue (these folks are homeless, not stupid)... and we have a recipe for the demographics of homeless populations in these 'desirable' areas being misreported and the percent of out-of-region homeless being under-reported as a rule.
Homeless folks definitely migrate to places that are more tolerant of homelessness and are all around "better" places to be homeless. SF, LA, Seattle, etc. are good places to be homeless. Boulder, CO is a good place to be homeless; they even put folks up in hotels in the winter for free when it is too cold outside.
Some people moved to these regions before being homeless, but they moved here for easy access to drugs and the overall drug climate (often not arrested or prosecuted for possession of hard drugs and pot is legal). This is sort of 'pre-homelessness'... their drug addiction was practically guaranteeing they would become homeless eventually.
BTW: Governments paying to bus their homeless people somewhere else so "it's not their problem" should be illegal unless tacitly agreement upon by the two regional/municipal governments. This practice is disgusting.
Let's not pretend society really wants to hug these people or employers want to hire them.
If you look up the amount spent per homeless person by SF on homelessness, you'll wonder how it is possible that they're giving away ONLY $1000 per month.
It's not only SF or Cali that has this image at this point. It's kinda hard to overlook when this simply does not exist where you are from.
These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern humanity.
They should either be forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast thrown away to some dark corner under a bridge or street.
IMO it shouldn't even that much to institutionalise/imprison/forcefully remove these people but even if it did cost as much or more, it would still be worth it.
Imagine what would clean safe streets do for these cities, it would create such a huge rebound!
If not, I want to play Judge Dredd this time!
Forget the fact that its whats the most liberal countries do, what else do you propose?
Whats draconian is the current state of affairs. Letting these people rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins here.
These people need help and those who don't need help are knowingly causing public harm. Public harm as in harming the public in the public spaces where the public pays ungodly amounts of taxes to keep them safe.
Yes, if you criminalize homelessness and imprison all the homeless in hospitals and prisons, I think you've technically solved homelessness. Your problem though is that to do so, you've gone full fascist, so now there's a new problem.
Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they aren't mentally ill, you forcefully remove them to the outskirts of the city. If they still keep coming back then you imprison them.
If you think this is fascist, then you are dangerously loosening the definition of fascism. You must see how playing with these words like this is extremely dangerous? Does "the boy you cried wolf" ring a bell?
> If they aren't mentally ill
And what happens when the people making the decisions on whether or not someone is mentally ill are religious conservatives who believe homosexuality and transgenderism is a mental illness?
Are you aware that religious conservatives often call leftism a mental disorder? They call wokeism a “mind virus”.
Maybe you think you have a good idea here with your homeless concentration camps, but all I see is a back door to prosecution and persecution for people you just don’t like to see. Today that’s the homeless, and when they’re gone you’ll move on to the next group. First they came for the socialists…
Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.
Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work.
And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab).
This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).
Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still).
Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant.
We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy.
You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.”
I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.
Criminalization of homeless on the streets is effective in eliminating the problem locally if a more permissive jurisdiction is nearby: eg you can’t lay down on a bench in Bellevue WA without swat coming out to talk to you, and so it’s easier to just go across the lake to Seattle where you can pitch a tent in a public park and maybe the police will get around to evicting you a few months later. No need to fund special buses, people will get to where they can live on their own.
Sending people from expensive places to live to cheap places to live is a good idea in theory, if it were just about affordability. The problem is that they’ve completely mis-identified the crisis, that people came to the rich cities because the rich cities had the tax base (and sympathetic voter base) to support services for them. Rather than talk about shipping people around, however, it might be time to introduce an internal residency system (give up on allowing free movement if we are going to insist on using local resources to solve these problems).
And the resolution has been terrible. Politicians (and voters) pick a position. They act on it, or don't. But, nothing is ever planned executed at a scale where it is expected to solve or make a visible dent in the problem as a whole.
So maybe your "position" is "housing first." It's popular, backed by academia, and it goes ahead.
At this point, resource efficiency, overall scale of impact and such don't matter. The action is "housing first" or it's "community centred" or "drug-free," "Jesus saves" or whatever... and that's enough. Ideology>efficacy when you don't expect to get anywhere anyway.
These big, ideologically charged, "toxic" issues are such that no one expects to "solve" them. So, they act at the operational level spending whatever resources they have without real strategics. Strategy becomes replaced with abstractions.
Unfortunately, politics is too short sighted to ever solve an issue that will truly take a decade+ of good policy to fix. And, as you mentioned, tackling the now problem is almost too toxic to touch, politically. Rock and a hard place.
Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical, purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the street.
A more modern example I recently stumbled across maybe 2 weeks ago was this crime story of this wicked nurse working in the ICU who was thrashing patients on his floor with air embolisms. The reason, the guy wanted to prolong the patients stay to ensure more overtime hours https://youtu.be/dgWcplHgAjU?t=645. Absolutely unbelievable.
People could move to the midwest and live very cheaply if that were the issue.
The true cause of homelessness is mostly mental health issues, at least in these big cities.
Or do you think buying bus tickets for people is some sort of impossible to do thing?
The main problem is that new housing is largely banned as established wealth that already have detached homes vote for politicians that promise to not allow any new homes near them.
You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide data. And then you could use that money to implement small scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still have billions left over.
For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.
Why is the 5% of people in the world who according to you are uncivilized concentrated in the U.S.?
Because homelessness of the sort that you see in the US simply doesn’t exist in most countries in the world. Both countries that are as rich or significantly poorer than the US.
This is not caused by some unprecedented economic crash or poverty crises. As I've said in the OP, "this is an epidemic of uninformed tolerance and apathy ravaging an entire nation."
These are either addicts, mentally ill or uncivilised people. Every society from the most liberal ones to the most tyrannical ones have set up laws and institutions to deal with them.
You forcefully institutionalise the mentally ill. You provide an option of voluntary treatment to addict or forced. You forcefully remove the uncivilised people.
I personally have stronger beliefs when it comes to what to do with these peoples but that will get me banned (its a little biblical).
What I'm talking about here is the humane/liberal option. The alternative is to let them rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins.
Spoken from a position of priviledge and perceived moral superiority. Where do you live, and how much do you earn? Have you ever considered what it would be like if you couldn't afford where you live, no matter how much you earn?
Cost of living has gone up but wages haven't. Minimum wage hasn't been adjusted in years, while rent & housing multiplied thanks to unfettered capitalism. I was lucky in that I managed to buy a house in 2017, but since then the prices have gone up and I would no longer be able to afford the house I live in were it to go on the market, despite my wage having gone up 50% or thereabouts.
It's a trite comment, but seriously, check your priviledge. A nontrivial percentage of the visitors of this website are homeless, couch surfing, live in a car, or pay more for a roof over their heads than they can actually afford.
I have another uncle who threw away 15 years of his life being a truck driver in the deserts of Saudi Arabia just so that his son and daughter could get a decent education. Meanwhile his wife (my aunt) raised two kids alone, whilst herding goats, chickens and managing a rubber planation.
Don't talk to me about privilege. These people are scum. Low lifes. Not only do they have access to handouts (especially in europe), they have access to an infinite amount of jobs.
How do you think tens of thousand of UNSKILLED people cross the border illegally with no money, work low skilled jobs and make enough money not only to sustain themselves but also to send money back.
You have no idea how privileged and uninformed you are. All these stories I told is because of communism. We are from one of the most blessed regions in the world, rivaling california and florida in beauty but communism ruined my state. Now everybody above 90 IQ is forced to be flee the country.
Everybody I know including myself are expats. Nobody wants to leave but they have no choice, there is no future here. So yeh I would have unfettered capitalism over your delusional childish theories of good vs bad.
Side Note: price increased are due to inflation caused by the expansion of the money supply. Guess what expands the money supply? Also in central banking system, this expansion is done through the banking system creating massive bubbles and extreme money concentrations.
Centering these programs in rich city centers is a failed policy and needs to be scrapped.
Where could people move that would give them more opportunities? Rural areas often lack the social resources to support people in more precarious situations, and big cities is where the opportunities are.
It could be a family with kids, who need a subsidy to live in a big-enough place, or an old person living off a tiny pension. etc
All measures will fail except those which recognise and address that absolute and ongoing certainty.
And is likely saving money compared with whatever the WSJ is pushing as an alternative.
Walking around parts of LA at night feels like you're in a neo-noir dystopian film. It's literally ghastly.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/harm-reduc...
(I don't have an opinion about the advocacy in this piece other than to say that I broadly agree with the diagnosis it has of the problem).
It's like pointing at construction cranes in a rapidly growing city and saying, "look none of this new housing is working because rents keep going up!"
California and so many other regions have real unaddressed homelessness issues that have long, long been utterly ignored. It's more likely that we're insufficiently addressing the real scope of the issue.
If people point to clear, concrete, distinct problems that's one thing. But gesturing vaguely at "boy lots of money being spent here" that's another.
Living near the heart of an ongoing unresolved homelessness crisis my entire life the driving force I've seen, despite all the money being spent is 1) largely an insufficient status quo approach and 2) no actual better ideas from those opposed.
So in fact both sides are doing badly.
Regarding point 1 in my jurisdiction, despite all the money being spent, all the ribbons being cut on performative new social housing projects, you can add up the numbers of units and find that over the decades there's actually constantly net loss of housing, as whatever occasionally new is created is dominated by the old affordable units being destroyed.
Despite this clear and provable net loss in affordable housing and an ensuing obvious expected rise in homelessness, critics point out that we spent too much money on homelessness, offering no better solutions themselves but simply to spend less money. Of course if less money was spent, if less homes were created, the net loss of units would be even more extreme, and the amount of visible street homelessness would only increase further.
These [scary big number] amounts of spending sound like waste but more likely that they're just barely enough to band aid the wounds and prevent utter disaster.
The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, there's people Newsom appointed. Don't just get me riled up, tell me what's actually going on so that I can inform myself of how to fix this. Don't just say this is a problem and point a singular finger talking about large sums of money, break it down. Tell me why homeless decreased in SF and Orange but increased in LA, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego[0]. Tell me why it skyrocketed since 2016, starting with Brown and then accelerated under Newsom[1]. Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues that NY and CA aren't.
Do some investigation. Distill expert information to me. Be a news article, not a political ad.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/blog/homeless-populations-are-rising-ar...
[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles...
Edit: I dug up some data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.
If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate that the problem is something happening in California, and maybe a state level solution is best.
You have to start the solution in the right place to have any hope of addressing the root cause.
We should look at it as "does this help or hurt people"
If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder it. And the federal government is just that, the collective power of all states combined.
So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.
The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.
California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.
Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali over Canada for the winter. California also provides massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless
These aren’t exhaustive reasons why, but it’s a core part of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to address complicated social problems head on and instead virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester
I’m not going to provide you with sources. It’s too politicized of a subject. If you don’t want to accept it for being this way i’ve learned not to argue. But at the very least if people really can’t see why this problem exists as it does, here an entry
Almost no data backs that up.
your dichotomy is a false representation. and a poor one at that
Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society, poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).
stop virtue signaling and start thinking or kindly avoid this topic because you’re only causing harm
CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)
There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.
There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.
I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.
>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).
But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.
Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/
Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.
1 - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tent...
Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll most likely find what you're looking for...
Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.
Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.
This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".
Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.
Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.
I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much less on the problem.
Draw your own conclusions...
We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.
I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.
Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.
I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.
Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.
17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.
Wrong.
The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.
We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material.
I don’t know what those regulations would look like. But without them we are drowning in material that does society more harm than good.
The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.
Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:
1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.
2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.
And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.
Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.
So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.
The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.
As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.
We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.
Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.
Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can have politics about things that you know about, anything less is tribalism.
You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight nor are you going to be able to march into the president's office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This is the power you have at the individual level. You are part of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is all connected.
Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy. Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or they censor. Both are effective.
Oh, yes. Some samples:
1. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/city-audit-finds-...
2. https://thefrisc.com/sf-has-fought-homelessness-with-no-bid-...
3. https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-homeless-nonprofit-housin...
This is common knowledge for folks in the Bay Area.
An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority coming from Texas.
Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was homeless upon arrival.)
In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.
If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.
That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.
It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.
It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.
Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.
1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...
"inland," sorry.
West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.
East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.
In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.
It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.
If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)
If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.
I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.
Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.
And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.
But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.
But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.
So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.
That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.
You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."
And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?
Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.
If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.
[0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...
The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.
We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.
We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.
We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.
The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.
So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.
Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:
Where do you put them?
For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).
So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.
But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.
And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.
And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.
Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.
It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?
Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.
> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.
> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...
> According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ...
So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.
Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.
Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage
It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.
Wait, what?
Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.
ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).
Good climate
Cities provide cash payments to them
Legal marijuana
Open air drug markets
Soft on crime prosecutors
Liberal population that wants to provide for them
Note: I make no judgement value on any of these items, just proposing reasons
- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.
- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]
- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.
- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?
Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.
[1] https://disa.com/maps/marijuana-legality-by-state
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-many-homeless-americ...
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is not homeless.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/a-builder-convert...
That is not the same as needing the opposing party in America’s duopolistic system.
Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.
> All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why.
Who: landowners.
How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and then using rent to capture money that should be going to said working class via wages and welfare.
Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and have the political influence to make it happen.
Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much overnight.
The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.
> and it's regressive
It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).
Meanwhile:
> VAT
That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.
With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.
Yes, but the vast majority of that equity is in the house itself, not in the land underneath it. On top of that, land in the suburbs is not as valuable as, say, land in Downtown (which is a big part of why the house itself is most of the value of a typical home).
> Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land.
Maybe not directly, but indirectly the vast majority of their wealth boils down to land. Every skyscraper, every warehouse, every factory, every mall, all those consume large swaths of typically-valuable land. In short:
> LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.
It would mostly fall on whomever owns the most land value - and that is overwhelmingly massive corporations and rich people. A middle class homeowner owns a tiny amount of land value in comparison - certainly far below their equal share, and therein lies the rub: 100% LVT disbursed directly, evenly, and entirely as UBI serves as a self-balancing system:
- If you own less land value than your equal share, you're paid for it
- If you own more land value than your equal share, you pay for it
That's purely theoretical (it's kind of the spherical frictionless cow of Georgist economics), but it should nonetheless illustrate that homeowners will in the vast majority of cases come out vastly ahead under LVT+UBI. Put simply: unless you own a single-family home in Downtown SF, replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT and getting back any surplus as UBI is in your best financial interest.
No, quite the contrary: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1156698343/city-of-tents-vetera...
Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]
But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl in the populace. [1][2]
So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie. chronic) homelessness.
[1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#:~:text=To%20get%20mo...
[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
[3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransi...
Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes are being spent on housing. These are people that are not homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor. Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing."{1}
Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population relative to the rest of the country.
The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to promote them and receive money for them despite their inability to get results. That is were all the money goes.
{1}https://flhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Good-News-f...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html#:~:text=Florid....
Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless problem to other states and also do so figuratively by criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.
If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to your state, all other things being equal.
This isn’t, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that California has some very successful industries that reward a narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both not adequately increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity better for the general good.)
[0] Not simple policy problems to resolve, the housing one for political reasons, the improving distribution without killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.
These two accounts have provided a gripping POV of this utter humanitarian crisis in SF:
https://twitter.com/bettersoma https://twitter.com/war24182236
More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high percentage of the chronically homeless who likely skew those stats pretty badly.
My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
Edit: In case it needs to be said again, the primary root cause is a nationwide shortage of appropriate housing options.
THIS ^^^
I do however agree that this is a national issue. I think places like New York and Boston are likely to see significantly worse homelessness themselves over the next decade.