This is the wrong focus. This type of approach tends to make things worse.
The more resources you pour into "helping the homeless," the worse the problem tends to get. You tend to magnify it.
California has seriously bad housing policies that actively push up the cost of housing. They have also underbuilt housing for decades, which is known to push up the cost of housing.
They need to be remedying that issue.
You also need to identify factors that put people at risk of homelessness and help people who have those characteristics rather than helping people based on their current lack of housing. You need to help them regardless of their housing status.
If you help people with serious problems conditional upon being homeless, you tend to entrench the problem of homelessness. It actively makes it harder to get off the street because you can't get help without first being homeless and then you may lose access to help if you get back into housing.
So good programs help people with certain problems or characteristics which put them at risk of homelessness and do so regardless of their current housing status. "Helping the homeless" is an approach that tends to be subject to the Shirky Principle: It tends to preserve the problem it is supposedly aiming to solve.
This data base is potentially of no real value in solving the problem, though it sure has terrific PR value for pretending to solve the problem.
If you really want to solve the problem, start fixing issues that push up market-rate housing to crazy high prices. And, you know, people in California don't really, seriously want that and you will be very hard pressed to get credit for "playing hero" and "helping the homeless."
I used to joke that "Someday, I will be a landlord providing affordable housing. No, I will not be celebrated as someone solving homelessness. I will be vilified in the press as a Slum Lord."
People making headlines for trying to help the homeless are people who want pats on the back for Playing Hero. And they are very much Playing.
I talked to a guy one day who was all "I have dreams of turning this entire block (of the small town where I currently live) into homeless services!" and I was like "Oh, look at the time! I have a meeting to attend! Buh-bye!"
If you really care about the people, you don't dream of growing homeless services. You dream of making society work so that few people end up homeless.
If you drive down home costs in hyper inflated cities in California, where people got legitimate loans on that hyper inflation, who is left holding the bag? Someone has to pay that debt that is now worthless due to decreased inflation, right?
This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
A place to start is simply put a stop to the hyper-inflation. Housing costs do not have to come down as your first step. Just stop having them double every other day, so to speak, and you will start easing some of these issues.
> This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
Buying a house that you plan to resell is an investment. You don't have a right to a profitable investment, especially not one appreciating at the price that they are in California.
I don't know about California specifically, but I have observed that homelessness is getting really out of control in Portland. It's just crazy how many tent camps have cropped up in public places all over the city. Just in the last year it has exploded. I felt really embarrassed just driving up the interstate and seeing it on display. We don't lack the resources to deal with it.
It seemed for a while like SLC had found a working solution. But as I recall, they eventually dropped it. It feels like a solvable problem, but as a society we will have to come to terms with our ideas of morality, as well as the role of gov't (specifically in health care and psychiatric treatment).
280k homeless?!?!? Japan claims they are down to ~4k nationwide and AFAIK they don't have nearly as much support for the homeless (could be totally wrong on that). What they do have AFAICT is a culture of self reliance so that someone who is homeless generally feels guilty about asking for help (not saying that's good or bad thing, only saying that's what I believe is the culture)
They aren't often easy to see but if go into a public park, if you see blue vinyl tarps in the bushes those are often a homeless person living there. There's a few in Yoyogi park and some in Shinjuku Central park (next to Tokyo's gov HQ). Otherwise in the winter some people try to sleep in the subway stations close to closing time.
Japan does not have "free" medical support AFAIK. You have to pay into the national health insurance or otherwise pay your own medical bills. On the other hand, prices are regulated.
Japan has a lot of homeless that can only be seen by visiting certain places,such as internet cafes, where they can shelter at least for a bit or for the whole night.
For that kind of price at an internet cafe, which may be outdated info anyway, you'd probably just get a chair at a shared table. The reclining chair and a little private cubicle would be quite a bit higher for an entire night, probably comparable to hotel rates. A shelter or youth hostel would be better.
I get the impression many of the homeless on Japan are quite a bit tidier than their US counterparts. They try to keep their areas neat and coordinate to keep their surroundings clean as well. Yes, occasionally you can see someone who just doesn’t care about appearances, but that’s more an exception.
Theyre homeless out of necessity. They tidy up because they don't want someone complaining about them so that they get harassed. The japanese mindset on homelessness is shame.
There is also a social/cultural "shame" mentality of being homeless there so people don't wear it like a badge like they kinda do in the US. Pot smoking hippies are looked on far worse there than they are here.
Build and maintain public housing. We should be making sure that housing is available for everyone. If you don't have housing it can be significantly more expensive and challenging to live (beyond the obviously visible challenges.)
California plans just that, well sort off. I heard they will convert prime real-estate parings along best beaches into tiny house lots, top dollar beach front properties for the homeless.
Part of the reason homelessness exists is to economically say "you can't afford to live here." Why do all these homeless people aggregate to large cities proportionally higher than in the midwest let's say? Cause nobody aspires to get famous and rich there. But homelessness is marginal in most areas because housing is hardly an issue.
If they use cell data, they will eventually be able to track real-time migration of non-residents living in the area. In the future, the census could be updated in real time.
Some like to pretend that we can just build infinite new housing, for free or almost no cost, and that will give everyone a nice American level luxury dwelling, all with no environmental costs. I feel like such opinions are built on ignorance or at the very least naïveté about the home building industry. One can invest in the home builders to profit from these misinformed opinions as they increasingly drive policy towards deregulation and corporate welfare for the mega-developers.
Maybe some people believe that, but overall that seems to be more of a straw-man argument if anything. I believe what is more common is the thought that we, as a country, can provide housing for people who have no place to live without making a large impact on tax payers below the upper class. Or is this naive in your opinion as well?
It’s innumerate I would argue. There are a lot of “ought to be” aspects to life but it’s not a very useful layer of thought. I prefer thinking about “what is” and from there think about changing things for the better. By “what is” I’m referring to empiricism, collecting data and using numbers to facilitate reason. The two modes, what ought to be vs what is, needn’t be incompatible, though acceptance is a difficult first step for many. In any case, if there is solid empirical evidence for the yimby-topian fantasies I hear, about how mixed used shopping plazas will solve the worlds ills, literally, I’ve yet to be convinced by any of it but I’d love to read any studies you might provide.
You are spot on here with this assessment. It would be far cheaper to buy busses for these people back to where they came from to live the lower COL life they can actually survive in.
Readit News
The more resources you pour into "helping the homeless," the worse the problem tends to get. You tend to magnify it.
California has seriously bad housing policies that actively push up the cost of housing. They have also underbuilt housing for decades, which is known to push up the cost of housing.
They need to be remedying that issue.
You also need to identify factors that put people at risk of homelessness and help people who have those characteristics rather than helping people based on their current lack of housing. You need to help them regardless of their housing status.
If you help people with serious problems conditional upon being homeless, you tend to entrench the problem of homelessness. It actively makes it harder to get off the street because you can't get help without first being homeless and then you may lose access to help if you get back into housing.
So good programs help people with certain problems or characteristics which put them at risk of homelessness and do so regardless of their current housing status. "Helping the homeless" is an approach that tends to be subject to the Shirky Principle: It tends to preserve the problem it is supposedly aiming to solve.
This data base is potentially of no real value in solving the problem, though it sure has terrific PR value for pretending to solve the problem.
If you really want to solve the problem, start fixing issues that push up market-rate housing to crazy high prices. And, you know, people in California don't really, seriously want that and you will be very hard pressed to get credit for "playing hero" and "helping the homeless."
I used to joke that "Someday, I will be a landlord providing affordable housing. No, I will not be celebrated as someone solving homelessness. I will be vilified in the press as a Slum Lord."
People making headlines for trying to help the homeless are people who want pats on the back for Playing Hero. And they are very much Playing.
I talked to a guy one day who was all "I have dreams of turning this entire block (of the small town where I currently live) into homeless services!" and I was like "Oh, look at the time! I have a meeting to attend! Buh-bye!"
If you really care about the people, you don't dream of growing homeless services. You dream of making society work so that few people end up homeless.
No one will call you a hero for that.
This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
Buying a house that you plan to resell is an investment. You don't have a right to a profitable investment, especially not one appreciating at the price that they are in California.
Dead Comment
It seemed for a while like SLC had found a working solution. But as I recall, they eventually dropped it. It feels like a solvable problem, but as a society we will have to come to terms with our ideas of morality, as well as the role of gov't (specifically in health care and psychiatric treatment).
https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
And California is really bad at providing housing that's affordable.
They aren't often easy to see but if go into a public park, if you see blue vinyl tarps in the bushes those are often a homeless person living there. There's a few in Yoyogi park and some in Shinjuku Central park (next to Tokyo's gov HQ). Otherwise in the winter some people try to sleep in the subway stations close to closing time.
Japan does not have "free" medical support AFAIK. You have to pay into the national health insurance or otherwise pay your own medical bills. On the other hand, prices are regulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan#Internet...
Deleted Comment
Really makes me sad, kids deserve better. We can do better.
/s
Nobody said anything about building housing for free, but we definitely could build way more housing than we currently are. Why is that ignorant?