Texas overall generally does well on homelessness because being homeless in Texas sucks and Greyhound bus tickets really aren't that expensive. They even give release cons open bus tickets if they don't have anyone picking them up. It isn't weird to find out some guy who was caught sleeping in someone's basement in Seattle was just released from a Texas prison two weeks ago.
If you want to solve your local homelessness problem, just make your city sucky to homeless in. Conversely, if you find yourself homeless, move to a city that is giving homes to homeless (housing first), and/or has the best social services. Without a residency system in place, any American can get social services in any city that is offering it, there is rarely any residency requirements (although there is something for HUD). For a city, if their homeless numbers go up, it can indicate that you are actually doing a good job, rather than a poor one.
The only issue is that local resources being applied to a national problem without residency restrictions is not going to be sustainable for obvious reasons.
It's pretty much the same program that nordic countries have had for decades. And there aren't any bus tickets involved.
> released from a Texas prison two weeks ago.
Parole is common for more of them than not. Leaving the sate for Seattle would be a no no in may cases. You want to make this statement you have GOT to bring some receipts on it.
Yes. Texas has an agreement with other states, the District of Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands to send and receive inmates for supervision. It is called the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision. Inmates approved to reside in other states must obey the rules of both Texas and the supervising state.
And
> What is “gate money”?
Gate money is $50.00 and a bus ticket provided to the released inmate on parole or mandatory supervision by the Correctional Institutions Division to help with transportation to the community to which they are being paroled to. They will receive an additional $50.00 upon reporting to their parole office.
End quote
Also, if you don’t have an address to parole out to, you simply don’t get parole and you are relaxed at the end of your sentence. These days the prisons want to get rid of you as quickly as possible, though, so they’ll make it work even if the only choice is to head to LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle.
Europe here. In general our taxes are higher but the infrastructure for healthcare and social safety nets are much better compared to US.
Many (not all) EU countries have more robust welfare systems. This includes healthcare, income support for those in need. Also accessible mental health and drug abuse treatment programs are common. Overall this prevents homelessness.
If you are homeless there are several programs to get you back on track. This includes shelters, (temporary) housing, financial support, work, food, coaching, healthcare, priority for social housing. Families (with kids) are not common to be homeless. Often there are special programs to get them off the street asap. Still there are some differences between EU countries. In west Europe there are better systems in place.
> Individuals and families have access to between $4,000 and $8,000, she said
More and more communism. If you don't let some people fail, then the entire system will eventually fail and take down everyone with it.
You cannot create a utopia. It's a dangerous hubris that destroys entire countries. Some people necessarily fail, and the best hope is for lessons to be learned, and education to prevail and teach people how to avoid it.
Let's watch while California creates a permanent underclass that are hopelessly trapped depending on government help. Let's watch as people's feelings empower bad decisions that do the exact opposite of what they think it will do, again and again.
some people just arent equipped to deal with the world and/or other people, for whatever reasons. best we can do for them is give them food and shelter for free. its not like theyre gonna go and have incredible amounts of fun, theyre by definition fkd. dont know why people want to see them suffer more than necessary its quite inhumane.
edit: was kinda replying to one of the comments further down but somehow posted as a top level. plz forgive.
The reason something like this is unacceptable in USA is because it will drive down property prices and increase wages because people can choose to not work multiple terrible jobs just to barely make food and rent.
ofc it would have economic impacts. but do we as a society really want to take advantage of our most vulnerable as is happening now? its the same with the basic income debate. healthy people most likely wouldnt just take it and do nothing but live off handouts, theyd be bored and start thinking up ways to fill their time -- potentially creating more economic benefits or some may voluntarily choose to do shitty jobs for extra income. if a product is of vital human importance and business cant get it done then govt can ensure its production. it wouldnt be an end to capitalism it would just be a more sustainable approach.
> advantage of our most vulnerable as is happening now? its the same with the basic income debate
I’m pretty sure it’s the same debate. If you distinguish between the two then it becomes a different debate. But the whole point of basic income is that everyone gets a baseline check every month, regardless of whether or how they spend it.
Even with basic income you’d still have homeless people who spent the money on things other than homes.
"We as a society" don't really decide on anything. The power to make laws and the power required to enforce them rest in the hands of a select few wealthy people who stand to lose money from the dissolution of manufactured scarcity and precarity. Policies like universal healthcare are viewed favourably by the American public especially when presented without the dressing of red scare but something like that (which many developed countries have to varying extent) does not even come close to being considered in the House and Senate because it would make Wall Street very uncomfortable.
I don’t think that’s the case actually. Your upbringing and society matters a lot. There are many countries with very low homeless rate and if you go to Europe, they have homeless but they are not even close to the homeless we have in the US. I am in Los Angeles and I have never seen anything like the situation here and I don’t think there is any if you go around the world. Maybe in the worst neighborhoods in third world countries. Even in Iran the homeless were not like they are here and I was raised there. Something is fundamentally wrong here
>We could have rented them all apartments for the year for that price. It would have made more sense.
No, you can't. You can not give the homeless apartments and I do mean that literally. "I pay for your rent, food, water, electricity and give you money for alcohol" isn't a good enough incentive for homeless people to stop being homeless. If it were homeless people wouldn't exist here in Germany, yet they do.
Europe certainly has way better social safety nets, so that really support GP’s call to provide basic support to all people in the USA. That’s probably not the only issue here but it’s a big one.
They clearly chose to not take advantage, that's the information I have to work off of in this
So is homelessness the problem, or the most visible symptom? My 'answer' is one final question: how is this not a mental health problem, among probably others? (Clerical, procedural, etc)
I'm rambling now, but we can throw stones at people or try to help. Perfect, better, enemies
Politics and such turn everything into an xy problem. The homeless that remain aren't the ones we'd see if nothing happens.
Hell, maybe they don't see a problem. That's not really even our place to say. Nobody wins in a society. That's the idea, in a way.
Edit: the simplest answer is that every system has bad-faith participation. The ones who want a home can get one, it's 'solved', except the fringe remains... the holdouts
There's a lot of room for study here. It isn't logical, and yet. Perhaps we're "solving" the wrong thing.
Yes, exactly. Homelessness is to a large extent mental illness, specifical mental illness so severe that it alienates everyone around you.
Blaming homelessness on a lack of social funding is just severely misinformed. But it is a very pleasant lie, because you can then imagine that a solution actually exists "if only...".
What are the homelessness rates between Germany and the US? Germany has good publicly funded medical care, schools, and housing. It may well be that lack of US investment in the same is in large part responsible for the I suspect huge differences between the two.
You can look at Germany and say “they didn’t completely solve the problem so we shouldn’t try anything they are doing” or you can recognize the huge strides their efforts have made towards this complex issue, and consider how we might do the same.
I was extremely surprised looking at the numbers. Apparently Germany has more homelessness people than the US in absolute terms. Which is around 4 times the prevalence in relative terms.
I don't know whether I am just comparing the wrong numbers or whether they count differently. But apparently Germany has much, much more homeless people.
Even the amount of sheltered people, is roughly the same in absolute terms.
As I said, it’s probably not the only issue but it’s a big one. As the comment I originally replied to said, Europe has homeless but the rates are much lower. Legally guaranteed housing would I think pretty clearly make a huge difference in the US.
You have to do it well though. In San Francisco we have homeless shelters that are so clearly alienating that people choose not to go. If you wouldn’t accept the housing we’re offering to others then it might not be a suitable solution. But if the homeless rates are much lower in Germany than in the US, it seems things like guaranteed housing probably have a lot to do with that.
They won't all take it. In particular the shelter. You can force them to suddenly be domestic or to live under someone else's rules.
> dont know why people want to see them suffer more than necessary
That's the hard part. Many of them positively take actions that make themselves suffer. Drug use in particular. If you've ever had a schizophrenic family member you know precisely this pain.
"The CIO integrated data from seven different county departments, de-identified for privacy, including emergency room visits, behavioral health care and large public benefits programs from food stamps to income support and homeless services, according to Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab. The program also pulled data from the criminal justice system."
I've built pilots of these kind of models for my government department (Victoria, Austalia). The prototypes in R using Random Forest models. Pilot version in Python using gradient boosting. We could have used deep learning models, but the increase in accuracy of the predictions is pretty minimal.
We haven't used these models outside of a pilot. There is a long lag to get other departments/services data and de-identify it and link it (we have a team that does this, it has a lot of safeguards to ensure privacy). Although old data is still quite predictive. A simple predictive score didn't help our workers do their job as they needed to justify their decisions with evidence. Giving the workers access to underlying information (they would need to have legal authority to view the data, so that excludes Homelessness support staff) often is missing what they need for their processes.
34 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadYou build houses.
You know why Houston Texas has done better than CA why nordic countries do better than the US. Housing first.
Because investments in homelessness that dont include homes are just perverse incentives to not fix the problem.
If you want to solve your local homelessness problem, just make your city sucky to homeless in. Conversely, if you find yourself homeless, move to a city that is giving homes to homeless (housing first), and/or has the best social services. Without a residency system in place, any American can get social services in any city that is offering it, there is rarely any residency requirements (although there is something for HUD). For a city, if their homeless numbers go up, it can indicate that you are actually doing a good job, rather than a poor one.
The only issue is that local resources being applied to a national problem without residency restrictions is not going to be sustainable for obvious reasons.
https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homele...
or...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-houston-successfully-reduce...
It's pretty much the same program that nordic countries have had for decades. And there aren't any bus tickets involved.
> released from a Texas prison two weeks ago.
Parole is common for more of them than not. Leaving the sate for Seattle would be a no no in may cases. You want to make this statement you have GOT to bring some receipts on it.
https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/faq/pd.html
> Can inmates be supervised in other states?
Yes. Texas has an agreement with other states, the District of Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands to send and receive inmates for supervision. It is called the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision. Inmates approved to reside in other states must obey the rules of both Texas and the supervising state.
And
> What is “gate money”?
Gate money is $50.00 and a bus ticket provided to the released inmate on parole or mandatory supervision by the Correctional Institutions Division to help with transportation to the community to which they are being paroled to. They will receive an additional $50.00 upon reporting to their parole office.
End quote
Also, if you don’t have an address to parole out to, you simply don’t get parole and you are relaxed at the end of your sentence. These days the prisons want to get rid of you as quickly as possible, though, so they’ll make it work even if the only choice is to head to LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle.
>> Gate money is $50.00 and a bus ticket provided to the released inmate on parole or mandatory supervision
You have some deep fundamental misunderstanding of what parole is, and how it works.
Statistics FY 2021
Number of Texas parolees supervised out-of-state: 2,646
Number of Texas probationers supervised out-of-state: 6,511
Number of parolees from other states supervised in Texas: 2,055
Number of probationers from other states supervised in Texas: 4,140
Interstate Compact processed 9,028 requests to transfer from Texas to other states.
Interstate Compact processed 9,917 requests for transfer from other states to Texas.
Source: https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/divisions/pd/interstate_compact.h...
Many (not all) EU countries have more robust welfare systems. This includes healthcare, income support for those in need. Also accessible mental health and drug abuse treatment programs are common. Overall this prevents homelessness. If you are homeless there are several programs to get you back on track. This includes shelters, (temporary) housing, financial support, work, food, coaching, healthcare, priority for social housing. Families (with kids) are not common to be homeless. Often there are special programs to get them off the street asap. Still there are some differences between EU countries. In west Europe there are better systems in place.
Germany will pay your rent, yet homeless people exist.
More and more communism. If you don't let some people fail, then the entire system will eventually fail and take down everyone with it.
You cannot create a utopia. It's a dangerous hubris that destroys entire countries. Some people necessarily fail, and the best hope is for lessons to be learned, and education to prevail and teach people how to avoid it.
Let's watch while California creates a permanent underclass that are hopelessly trapped depending on government help. Let's watch as people's feelings empower bad decisions that do the exact opposite of what they think it will do, again and again.
edit: was kinda replying to one of the comments further down but somehow posted as a top level. plz forgive.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same debate. If you distinguish between the two then it becomes a different debate. But the whole point of basic income is that everyone gets a baseline check every month, regardless of whether or how they spend it.
Even with basic income you’d still have homeless people who spent the money on things other than homes.
Go look at what Houston did. Look at what CA did.
https://www.ocregister.com/2023/07/18/something-is-clearly-o...
WE spent 42k per homeless person.
We could have rented them all apartments for the year for that price. It would have made more sense.
No, you can't. You can not give the homeless apartments and I do mean that literally. "I pay for your rent, food, water, electricity and give you money for alcohol" isn't a good enough incentive for homeless people to stop being homeless. If it were homeless people wouldn't exist here in Germany, yet they do.
Yet homeless people still roam the streets and they have encampment under bridges or in subway stations.
Even maximalists safety nets don't resolve homelessness.
I don't think zero is realistic. Roaming is flexible, we talking Europe or Texas intersection? Obviously I kid, that's loaded.
So is homelessness the problem, or the most visible symptom? My 'answer' is one final question: how is this not a mental health problem, among probably others? (Clerical, procedural, etc)
I'm rambling now, but we can throw stones at people or try to help. Perfect, better, enemies
Politics and such turn everything into an xy problem. The homeless that remain aren't the ones we'd see if nothing happens.
Hell, maybe they don't see a problem. That's not really even our place to say. Nobody wins in a society. That's the idea, in a way.
Edit: the simplest answer is that every system has bad-faith participation. The ones who want a home can get one, it's 'solved', except the fringe remains... the holdouts
There's a lot of room for study here. It isn't logical, and yet. Perhaps we're "solving" the wrong thing.
Blaming homelessness on a lack of social funding is just severely misinformed. But it is a very pleasant lie, because you can then imagine that a solution actually exists "if only...".
You can look at Germany and say “they didn’t completely solve the problem so we shouldn’t try anything they are doing” or you can recognize the huge strides their efforts have made towards this complex issue, and consider how we might do the same.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Germany And: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S... the statistics section
I don't know whether I am just comparing the wrong numbers or whether they count differently. But apparently Germany has much, much more homeless people.
Even the amount of sheltered people, is roughly the same in absolute terms.
You have to do it well though. In San Francisco we have homeless shelters that are so clearly alienating that people choose not to go. If you wouldn’t accept the housing we’re offering to others then it might not be a suitable solution. But if the homeless rates are much lower in Germany than in the US, it seems things like guaranteed housing probably have a lot to do with that.
Do you have evidence for that? In a comment below I listed the numbers for Germany and the US. Apparently Germany has a much bigger problem.
>Legally guaranteed housing would I think pretty clearly make a huge difference in the US.
Why? It does not put Germany above the US, in relative numbers Germany is 4x worse. Even the ratio of homeless and homeless sheltered is the same.
They won't all take it. In particular the shelter. You can force them to suddenly be domestic or to live under someone else's rules.
> dont know why people want to see them suffer more than necessary
That's the hard part. Many of them positively take actions that make themselves suffer. Drug use in particular. If you've ever had a schizophrenic family member you know precisely this pain.
We haven't used these models outside of a pilot. There is a long lag to get other departments/services data and de-identify it and link it (we have a team that does this, it has a lot of safeguards to ensure privacy). Although old data is still quite predictive. A simple predictive score didn't help our workers do their job as they needed to justify their decisions with evidence. Giving the workers access to underlying information (they would need to have legal authority to view the data, so that excludes Homelessness support staff) often is missing what they need for their processes.