There is an episode of the "you're wrong about" podcast, that discusses homelessness. In that episode there are several discussion about several projects in California around homelessness. Those projects provided housing. The studies based on those projects showed that overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services. The podcast goes into more details, but as I remember this was because
* It removes much of the medical and police cost
* If people who are struggling don't have a roof over their head, it makes it incredibly hard for them to get a job. Having some stability meant that many could pick them selves up and get a job and so forth.
The end of the episode points out even though the programs were a success by most metrics - including being cheaper overall to tax payers - they were shut down.
The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free?
What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
The way 'housing first' has been implemented in SF is terrible. It is operated as a lottery helping a very tiny percentage of the homeless with a house/apt worth $1mil+. Those numbers will never solve the problem.
If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent.
The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process.
Around year 2009-2010, I worked in public sector in Helsinki in the real estate department. I worked the phone handling tenants calling and needing repairs. A large portion of the tenants were people from the homeless program. At the time I did not know this program was unusual.
My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly, although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part, just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate building to the social workers in the homeless building they can then give out to new tenants.
I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've seen here.
I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's inhumane to make demands.
I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in California. Housing is super expensive, and I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care. I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings, windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
I think the biggest thing these programs fail to take into account is that a significant portion of San Francisco's homeless population is not from San Francisco. I've met kids on Haight Street who said they'd rather be homeless in SF than in an apartment in Cleveland. Are you housing all the homeless people who migrated to SF, and then keep housing all the new people who show up?
The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
In Finland, it is housing first with a live in social worker. Also, for many, they never get a job or anything like that (their mental illness or substance abuse problems are never cured), it’s just that it is cheaper for the Finnish government to house these people than not.
Solving the housing problem at a municipal, county or state level doesn't make any sense, without adding internal passport controls and internal visas. Housing is a national problem that needs to be handled by the federal.
I have no problem using my Federal taxes to house the homeless. But I can't stand when my city tries to house people using my property taxes. It doesn't make any sense, they have no control over the inputs. It's creating an incentive at the national level to relocate to my city/county/state.
They don't get it for free in Finland - your link says it is important that they are tenants, have a contract, and pay rent(possibly with housing assistance).
Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc, and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will just enable the drug addiction types.
I like the idea, but I don't think a homeless person should be entitled to free housing in one of the most expensive real estate areas of the world. Why work full time at mcdonalds to pay rent when you could just be a drug addict with a free house? Maybe we could create free housing communities where real estate is a bit cheaper.
There was a recent study that, like everything else with the homelessness problem, Housing First is most successful in places where housing is not ridiculously expensive to find, so the costs of implementation are low and housing units to place people in actually exist.
The exact same things that burden the private housing sector in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning, neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) also restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the exact same laws.
The other hesitation with “housing first” is that it’s associated with housing projects, aka ghettos. I’ve seen The Wire (2002-2008). Is what they’re going to build for the homeless going to be like that? Is it going to be where my kids play? Is it going to be where I walk my dog at night?
It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
What people do consider is that it's extraordinarily unfair for many people who struggle with housing costs -- imagine what eg SF-area rents do to a cook or cleaner earning even $50k annually -- if we're going to provide that for free to junkies.
Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
It's not a housing problem, it's a drug and mental health problem. Many of the unhoused people you see could stay in shelters but don't--often the areas near shelters have the most camps near them. They simply don't want to follow any rules and now conditions are so accommodating that being outside in good weather is better than staying in a shelter with a curfew.
Why are all the lofty examples from countries that are hostile to refugees/immigrants like Scandinavian countries.
Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.
There are some housing near my house that was simply repurposed motels. Seems to work, I don't notice any people just hanging around. Seems to work better than the standard homeless shelters we have here, that are pretty restrictive and they force the homeless to leave during the day and return at night.
> What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice. What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
There are a lot of social programs. So many, in fact, it seems like an increasing number of people find it better to live off those than pursue traditional methods of earning income to support themselves.
Among my extended in-laws, there are several groups gaming the welfare system, scamming family, and doing whatever they can to live on the dole and they become downright sinister when something threatens their benefits. They have no interest in becoming productive citizens. To the best of my knowledge, they are only parasites, provide no value to society or family, and their offspring are following in their footsteps.
I’d be more than happy to cut people like that off, but how so without potentially harming those in need who want to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. Is it reasonable to expect adults to attempt to, minimally, live a life with neutral utility?
Helsinki is vastly different from San Francisco in many ways, which makes the comparison difficult. One obvious difference is the provision of universal healthcare in a coordinated and multidisciplinary approach, in order to care for the varying and often complex needs many homeless people require. Housing First is the merely the first step from which all other care follows. Unless San Francisco and society is prepared to provide something closer to what is delivered in Helsinki as a whole, then they may as well be pissing in the wind.
It doesn’t trigger me. But the idea that you can give them housing without judgement or constraints is absurd. Drug use is bad and is the overwhelming cause of their problems. The ones who succeed with this approach are also the ones not abusing drugs.
In addition, I’m not convinced you need to buy them housing in the worlds most expensive region—and one that’s deeply permissive about drug use and theft.
> society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
Sure, if the alternative is “do nothing.” But if you committed the mentally ill who are endangering themselves and others to mental institutions (not jail) then 90% of these problems go away.
You cannot have a welfare state and a liberal immigration policy.
Sure, if you do nice things for poor people their lives improve, and so does society, not only because we are kinder, but also because their problems don't become problems for unrelated people.
But, if you do nice things for poor people as a government and open the door we have the objective truth that there are billions of poor people in the world who would love to be taken care of too. You will attract them and, like the Tragedy of the Commons, everyone will be poorer and less happy.
Before anyone says "this isn't the right topic" I must point out that the population of the US has doubled since the 1950's, but the infrastructure has not. The rise in population is immigration, not native. There is a cost of immigration that is borne by the local population outside of the government for immigration if the housing stock does not keep pace with population, and if immigration is used to attack prevailing wages. What happens is that housing costs increase and income goes down, i.e. the native population gets poorer.
Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US. So there may at some point be a required tradeoff but the US isn't there yet.
What Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits that soak up billions of dollars in public money without actually providing significant housing for homeless people: instead, the government just does it.
It's a spectrum of people who face housing insecurity due to economic circumstances, to people who resist/actively shun societal contacts that help us all function (often fueled by serious substance addictions.) While the solutions that have been embraced by San Fransisco's current electorate (free cash/housing/no rules) could make sense for the former, that doesn't mean it's a good solution for the latter. And unfortunately it's the latter side of the spectrum that exerts hugely outsized impact in terms of both resources spent and negative draw on the rest of society.
So yeah... more housing would be great, but affordability shouldn't be used as societal gaslighting to excuse the current mess we have in San Francisco. Until the city finds the resolve to enforce some minimum standards of accountability, the problem will only get worse, and the rest of us will just vote with our feet.
I can tell you about the experience with "housing first" approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here.
There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.
In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing.
Why? Because the one condition of getting housing was to join a drug counseling program.
There is an entire line of thought that goes something like "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling? That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"
It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of them will die.
They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example, of a couple living on the street in which one partner is physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.
So a measure that at first glance seems stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may seem like the opposite.
This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that it's not actually as simple as one would think.
A lot of full-on junkies will essentially trade their public housing apartments to dealers who use it as as safe spot to deal out crack/heroin. The dealers don't operate our of their own house for safety so they hire junkies and use their places as distribution centers in exchange for 'free' drugs, while still letting them sleep in their bedrooms.
Then the apartments eventually turn into crack dens. Eventually the door gets kicked in by police and the dealers find another person willing to exchange free drugs to let them use their place. Plus the junkies going in/out of jail and their apartment gets used when they aren't there.
This sort of thing puts a ton of pressure on the normal families trying to live in those apartment buildings. A small group can definitely ruin entire floors of those apartments.
Just the fact that you can have a safe place to store your belongings and sleep in peace is a huge improvement. A fridge to store food so it doesn't spoil and a place to cook food.
No need to sleep with one eye open hugging your boots and bag so that nobody steals them in the shelter's open housing.
I am skeptical of podcasts which reach a conclusion that is always within the overton window of the era. "This incredibly complex question has a solution that perfectly fits within the moral-mores of this decade." It is the John Oliver phenomenon, that starts with a pre-determined conclusion and then exclusively looks at evidence supporting the pre-determined conclusion.
In SF you're either a local or a transplant. A person who gets evicted, is by definition financially insecure. A local when evicted, can always move back in with family/friend unless their community disowns them. A transplant in a low-income job, has no reason to continue living in SF if they moved here for work. They can always move back.
SF's homeless crisis (last 20 years) is entirely due to a rise in homeless people with mental illness & substance abuse. [1] The key issue is drugs. 100%. Housing is the 2nd most important issue, no doubt. But, any blindly adopted housing first policy from a place without the same drug issues will fail, and will fail miserably.
If you're that interested in the question, why not give the podcast a fair listen and check their arguments directly ?
It's not some over the top over produced podcast like Last Week Tonight, and they're transparent about their sources and their opinion. The point of the show is to engage with verifiable information.
What all, and I mean all of those measures miss, often even intentionally, is that homelessness is a symptom, not the problem.
People like throwing money at homelessness because it is a subconscious absolution for their own guilt in causing it by being part of a machine that defrauds the mass of humans through money printing, i.e., fraud, that sees the value of someone’s labor diluted in order to provide ever more worthless currency to the decadent neo-aristocratic class that is also heavily represented in this forum, including myself.
Want to end homelessness? I know you don’t, but if you did, because that would mean you wouldn’t have all the money you have that was pilfered from others through deception and fraud. But if you did, then we would stop the massing theft through fraud that is money printing, aka inflation, aka fraud; selling one thing, delivering something of lesser value, dilution, theft by deception.
Then our benevolent government wouldn’t have to spend any money, because the value of labor for the homeless would allow them to have dignity that our class steals and robs them of, regardless of the government alms we throw them. Even the government money is not even our own money, but overwhelmingly also yet more of other peoples money that was stolen and defrauded through debt, taxes, and money printing.
We are all no different than Escobar that was relatively generous with his money to keep the vile enterprise going on the backs of people’s suffering.
Yes, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people who do not actually want to solve a problem, they just want to feel good about themselves.
The episode focuses on Utah’s housing first program, not California. They also bring up that it wasn’t a panacea and in practice it took more time than expected before the cost to the public went down.
> overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services
This is always the justification for socialist-style programs. It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading. What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find yourself with a lot more homeless than you used to have. Your studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we've seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites more homeless.
I’m all for housing and support to help people get back on their feet. I just don’t understand why that housing has to be in SF/Oakland.
It is a crazy dense and expensive area. There are cities that would gladly take in low skill workers who are subsidized by the government. Do they offer them transfers and housing in other cities?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Having lived/spent time in a few places with varying homeless problems and approaches to homelessness, I find it fucking depressing every time I read about how badly - and inefficiently - the US handles it.
Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country.
Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind housing.
Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland).
There’s no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private. And that’s a whole clusterfuck that seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.
The Greater Boston Food Bank CEO cleared a $500K salary this year, for a job that's largely remote because the area is too dangerous for the non-profit white collar workers. Do you think she wants "food insecurity" to be solved?
There are two ways to look at: (a) pay them more, and get the best results and less corruption (b) pay them less, and get the worst results with more corruption. In the states, politicians get paid, but they make through 'corruption' through revolving door, sinecure jobs for friends and family members, campaign contributions. In Singapore, politicians are paid better than the private sector, thereby reducing the corruption.
> If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
A lot of these programs are hard to stop paying into once you start. Say you are a political leader and you try to solve homelessness by pouring $X per year into some new program. 5 years later it's clear the program is not effective. However, if you axe the program, good luck getting re-elected since you've now made it very easy for your opponent to lambaste you ("Hundreds of society's most vulnerable brace themselves as Governor X seeks to axe homeless program").
This is the fundamental reason why democracies often face challenges. For instance, let's consider a country like India, where a significant portion of the population isn't financially well-off. As a result, there is an expectation for government assistance and benefits during each election cycle. Consequently, politicians who promise freebies or welfare programs tend to have a higher likelihood of being elected. This pattern is not unique to India; it can be observed in various other places as well. Even in the United States, which prides itself on its democratic system, the influence of this phenomenon is evident
"Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland)."
This seems to not reflect reality in the US. There is strong local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor people or worse homeless, leading to tight zoning and rejection of projects during the byzantine approval process. If the government tries to build something, the EPA (environmental protection act) also allows anyone to request that a environmental impact study needs to take place. The study can take about a year and there are no teeth, other than causing delay and cost through the study. Nothing needs to change based on the findings, it's just another way to drag things out and increase cost on projects someone doesn't like.
> The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private.
It's a LOT more than making affordable housing available. Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both. Some are also homeless in large part because of criminal records. Many many difficult social problems to fix before it's just a matter of affordability.
> Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both
If drug addicts don't have to pay rent, then they do drug addict stuff within the premises of their house. It doesn't solve the mental health crisis, but it does solve tents in public areas.
Secondly, it controls for for gateway drug scenarios. Eventually, a large percent chronically homeless & mentally ill people turn into addicts. But, if they have a roof over they shoulders, they aren't pushed into that life as hard as if they were living in a tent.
That’s just not borne out by any evidence. It’s likely you don’t interact (or don’t knowingly interact) with a large portion of homeless people who aren’t drawing attention to themselves.
> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Well, that’s simple. Most of the money goes to politically well connected non-profits with missions around alleviating homelessness. The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away and everybody at that non-profit loses their jobs. I’m not specifically accusing anyone of corruption, but the incentives aren’t good.
The funny thing is, you don't even need corruption. Every single one person in those GONGOs could be genuinely willing to help the homeless. The problem is, if their financing is detached from whether their strategies are successful - and even smart and honest people have great capacity for self-delusion, which is only enhanced when the mission is morally laudable - then the money could be wasted as thoroughly as if they were corrupt.
>The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away
That actually isn't what happens at all though. When we handle this at the state level, spending on homelessness just makes that state more attractive to the homeless in other states and exacerbates the problem.
In a way, the US "handles" it very efficiently, but only in terms of spending the money and funnel them to the related interest group, but not in terms of solving the homeless problem.
Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew.
If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.
It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if there were political will.
We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.
> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.
That is absolutely not true. Not even close.
Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness.
One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about.
Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status.
In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them.
Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.
It's going to the administrators of the homeless industrial complex. It's the same problem we're seeing with colleges where the number of administrators has dramatically grown year over year.
Managerial bloat. The more money we give, the more they grow.
My partner and I recently returned from a road trip through Cali and were absolutely shocked by the societal issues in San Francisco.
You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.
It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.
Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.
One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.
That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.
And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.
> 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.
Edit: Reply to paisawalla
May I point out the post I replied to had no data. If you have data that addresses the two points you made, please post them. It is always easy to nitpick data when you have none.
I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ......
Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.
I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.
Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.
> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills.
Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.
> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Towards more homelessness. They are subsidizing it. Literally paying people money to be homeless.
It's ultimately a government jobs program, just like almost all government programs. If it employs people, it's good, regardless of whether it accomplishes the stated outcome.
What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways.
A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting people in them.
Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live.
Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption, where organizations that provide 'services' have good relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness" concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put them into homes.
We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street.
But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.
SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites.
Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services.
Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem.
I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to be better than a tent under a bridge.
On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.
Then figure out what rules can and cannot work. I listened to a podcast were a vet's fucking service dog disallowed him from getting into rehab. A service dog!
What is the fraction of people that could have housing and are choosing not to receive it, and the fraction that would accept housing but has not been offered it?
25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets. We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated.
I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should be supported in a much different way than we support drug addicts.
Rehab might be one of the least effective solutions of all [0]. If it's inpatient then you are paying for housing anyway, but without any of the benefits of stability that would allow someone to use it as a springboard to get a job.
Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure.
In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse).
For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse, treatment first is the only viable solution, but we're not legally allowed to force someone into treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger to themselves or others.
There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job".
It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.
It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type program for violating the laws that make them incompatible. Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory' policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like property damage and illegal drug use.
[0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.
Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money directly does not help them.
Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
> Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first" has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot for them.
Edit: Unlike the sibling poster I am saying it give it to them directly.
I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from
that $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no they do drugs?! like the heaviest drug users I've ever met aren't white collar.
Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary spending every month.
Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that would be life changing to the average american household per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn't change lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been traumatized by homelessness and stuck.
In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new wife.
IMO The issue is that anytime more money becomes available, CA government/bureaucracy sucks it up. Lots of state jobs created to run these programs that ultimately do little good. Seems more like middle class jobs program than actually attempting to solve the problem.
"... or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments"
A common misconception - but money is not housing. There are no extra 1BD units available. We could use this money to outbid other people to put the current homeless in those places, displacing others and somewhat increasing overall rent prices (and/or waiting lists). But I don't think that's what you intend.
In the end, if we want more people to have housing, then we have to allow more housing to be built. It's not (just) a money problem.
Utah has been doing a housing first program for about 20 years. It has definitely helped a lot of people, but it hasn't really solved the problem either.
(I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a bunch of other things - who knows).
I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable.
Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies.
The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then their political ambitions likely get killed.
This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost effective with worse outcomes.
My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
> My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?
California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major cities.
> Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space
To play the devil's advocate to my sibling commentators: if you equate "conservative" politics and NIMBY politics, this claim could certainly hold some substance. (The argument: NIMBY = conservative in the sense that they oppose change.)
Also, just off the cuff I'm going to bet the overhead/fraud rate is more
like 50% than 10%. Basis: think of the overhead regular companies budget, about 30% of salary.
> I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable.
> Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies.
I'm trying to figure out the basis for your argument... surely you aren't suggesting that places like California want to do this but can't seem to overcome the conservative opposition in the state legislature, right? :)
Conservatives and Progressives alike (but not all of either) block new housing from being built.
With no data to back it up, I suspect it's really older folks who don't want the housing to be built. And I think the psychology of it might be preserving things the way the are or used to be. I'd be interested to see some data that supports/refutes this speculation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't care anymore. Bus them out to the desert. Set up camp there. Provide food and busses into town for those with interviews and jobs. I really don't care, just get them out of the damn cities. I've seen too many people shit in the bushes or just peeing up against a building. Building tent cities on the beach and enjoyable areas, etc. I. Don't. Care. Get rid of them. I left California for this reason and housing costs.
This. I have small children, and all the local parks are completely unsafe and unusable because of the homeless population.
The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.
I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just “oh well, what can we do?” About all this. There is a LOT we can do, we don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to put up with any of this.
There is a pretty big range of solutions between shanty towns and concentration camps in the desert. When you become homeless you are effectively excluded from polite society and it is pretty hard to climb out of. You have states and municipalities trying to tinker at the edges but as many other people have pointed out, with freedom of movement the localities that are completely disinterested at solving the any of the causes will just move their problems onto those that do. How would you like it if you were forcibly bussed out into a desert concentration camp, away from your support networks and people you know? How much would you care about polite society if you fell into the hole and now everyone just comes and spits on your face like this a little more each day?
> The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.
It turns out that when you construct a society in which a "cost of living" is a normal concept, people without money are largely excluded from said society. You've excluded them from malls, shopping centers, museums, restaurants, streets, government buildings, and anywhere else you can. They can't get educated, they can't train themselves, they can't get access to healthcare, because we've all decided that those services are only available to those with money. Now they find themselves in the parks, because it's the only place they're allowed to legally exist. But I guess that's not enough, because you and the parent poster would prefer to "concentrate" them in desert "camps" as your "final solution" to homelessness. Really amazing to see the masks off here.
I'm there too. I'm blown away by all the "housing first" advocates here, as though that hasn't been the message for the last fifteen years and many, many billions of dollars. IT. DOESN'T. WORK. Yes, if in a magical land you held the number of homeless steady and efficiently built housing, you could solve homelessness. But that's not what happens. Not only are the government institutions in charge of building that housing hopelessly corrupt, but the more you build, the more you recruit.
We offer many, many hands to those who are down on their luck and need help. I personally donate to several every year. For those willing, there's a publicly-funded escalator to a better life. But the ones who used to shit on my sidewalk, throw beer cans in my flower beds, and graffiti everything in site (I've since moved out of the city) aren't interested in taking the escalator. They don't care about anyone. They only care about their next fix. They need to be involuntarily incarcerated. If they won't participate in the usual programs, then ship them to the desert. I just don't care anymore.
Not him, but it would likely be my own fault and weakness if I end up like that and people have every right to ridicule me for acting ridiculous. That is, pooping on the streets and leaving needles everywhere.
Important to remember that every one of us are just a few accidents away from being ejected from society too. I try to catch myself when I'm looking down my nose at the bum who make a mess of my recycling because there is another richer person looking down their nose at me!
Well, it is normal to have such feelings when people are harassed by those people. Yesterday, in Texas while I was harassed by kids. They used all the slurs and it was so bizarre to me. In California, I can't imagine the situation.
It only takes few people to ruin experience for all people.
I hope you never end up in a situation where people decide not only to leave you in pool of your own urine on the sidewalk, but to feel righteous about their activism to make sure you're left there.
Agreed, get them out of functional society. I’m sick of the Quaker quasi religious Progressives who think they can cure everything. It’s like dude, these are broken fucked up people. Get them out of society and try and rehab whatever ones still have something left. Just get them out.
We used to have asylums. Maybe it’s time to bring these back and house these people in them with whatever medication can sedate them. Not saying bring back the lobotomy but maybe we institutionalize people that are obviously crazy?!
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
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.
> 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.
Readit News
* It removes much of the medical and police cost
* If people who are struggling don't have a roof over their head, it makes it incredibly hard for them to get a job. Having some stability meant that many could pick them selves up and get a job and so forth.
The end of the episode points out even though the programs were a success by most metrics - including being cheaper overall to tax payers - they were shut down.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id13...
Here's the one on homelessness
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/homelessness/id1380008...
Theres a good one about the "wellfare queen" that is related and rather eye opening
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ronald-reagan-and-the-...
The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free?
What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent.
The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process.
https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-con...
My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly, although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part, just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate building to the social workers in the homeless building they can then give out to new tenants.
I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've seen here.
I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's inhumane to make demands.
I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in California. Housing is super expensive, and I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care. I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings, windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
I have no problem using my Federal taxes to house the homeless. But I can't stand when my city tries to house people using my property taxes. It doesn't make any sense, they have no control over the inputs. It's creating an incentive at the national level to relocate to my city/county/state.
Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc, and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will just enable the drug addiction types.
They shouldn't get it for free. They should be required to be in recovery programs and have jobs. Create state or federal jobs for them if necessary.
The exact same things that burden the private housing sector in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning, neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) also restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the exact same laws.
It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
If California tried this, it would probably attract too many people to the state and run out of money.
Finland, a tiny baltic nation that has almost nothing in common with the USA.
Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.
There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice. What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
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There are a lot of social programs. So many, in fact, it seems like an increasing number of people find it better to live off those than pursue traditional methods of earning income to support themselves.
Among my extended in-laws, there are several groups gaming the welfare system, scamming family, and doing whatever they can to live on the dole and they become downright sinister when something threatens their benefits. They have no interest in becoming productive citizens. To the best of my knowledge, they are only parasites, provide no value to society or family, and their offspring are following in their footsteps.
I’d be more than happy to cut people like that off, but how so without potentially harming those in need who want to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. Is it reasonable to expect adults to attempt to, minimally, live a life with neutral utility?
In addition, I’m not convinced you need to buy them housing in the worlds most expensive region—and one that’s deeply permissive about drug use and theft.
Sure, if the alternative is “do nothing.” But if you committed the mentally ill who are endangering themselves and others to mental institutions (not jail) then 90% of these problems go away.
SF, like much of California, has refused to build housing for half a century, while the population has kept increasing.
To house a homeless person there, someone else pretty much has to move out.
> has been proven to work in Finland
could be parsed in 2 different ways.
> (has been proven to work) in Finland
or
> has been proven to (work in Finland)
Which has radically different meanings for applicability to the US.
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Sure, if you do nice things for poor people their lives improve, and so does society, not only because we are kinder, but also because their problems don't become problems for unrelated people.
But, if you do nice things for poor people as a government and open the door we have the objective truth that there are billions of poor people in the world who would love to be taken care of too. You will attract them and, like the Tragedy of the Commons, everyone will be poorer and less happy.
Before anyone says "this isn't the right topic" I must point out that the population of the US has doubled since the 1950's, but the infrastructure has not. The rise in population is immigration, not native. There is a cost of immigration that is borne by the local population outside of the government for immigration if the housing stock does not keep pace with population, and if immigration is used to attack prevailing wages. What happens is that housing costs increase and income goes down, i.e. the native population gets poorer.
What Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits that soak up billions of dollars in public money without actually providing significant housing for homeless people: instead, the government just does it.
It's a spectrum of people who face housing insecurity due to economic circumstances, to people who resist/actively shun societal contacts that help us all function (often fueled by serious substance addictions.) While the solutions that have been embraced by San Fransisco's current electorate (free cash/housing/no rules) could make sense for the former, that doesn't mean it's a good solution for the latter. And unfortunately it's the latter side of the spectrum that exerts hugely outsized impact in terms of both resources spent and negative draw on the rest of society.
So yeah... more housing would be great, but affordability shouldn't be used as societal gaslighting to excuse the current mess we have in San Francisco. Until the city finds the resolve to enforce some minimum standards of accountability, the problem will only get worse, and the rest of us will just vote with our feet.
There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.
In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing.
Why? Because the one condition of getting housing was to join a drug counseling program.
There is an entire line of thought that goes something like "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling? That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"
It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of them will die.
They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example, of a couple living on the street in which one partner is physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.
So a measure that at first glance seems stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may seem like the opposite.
This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that it's not actually as simple as one would think.
Then the apartments eventually turn into crack dens. Eventually the door gets kicked in by police and the dealers find another person willing to exchange free drugs to let them use their place. Plus the junkies going in/out of jail and their apartment gets used when they aren't there.
This sort of thing puts a ton of pressure on the normal families trying to live in those apartment buildings. A small group can definitely ruin entire floors of those apartments.
No need to sleep with one eye open hugging your boots and bag so that nobody steals them in the shelter's open housing.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883985-homelessness
In SF you're either a local or a transplant. A person who gets evicted, is by definition financially insecure. A local when evicted, can always move back in with family/friend unless their community disowns them. A transplant in a low-income job, has no reason to continue living in SF if they moved here for work. They can always move back.
SF's homeless crisis (last 20 years) is entirely due to a rise in homeless people with mental illness & substance abuse. [1] The key issue is drugs. 100%. Housing is the 2nd most important issue, no doubt. But, any blindly adopted housing first policy from a place without the same drug issues will fail, and will fail miserably.
[1] https://dynomight.net/img/homeless-crisis/coc/CA-San%20Franc...
It's not some over the top over produced podcast like Last Week Tonight, and they're transparent about their sources and their opinion. The point of the show is to engage with verifiable information.
People like throwing money at homelessness because it is a subconscious absolution for their own guilt in causing it by being part of a machine that defrauds the mass of humans through money printing, i.e., fraud, that sees the value of someone’s labor diluted in order to provide ever more worthless currency to the decadent neo-aristocratic class that is also heavily represented in this forum, including myself.
Want to end homelessness? I know you don’t, but if you did, because that would mean you wouldn’t have all the money you have that was pilfered from others through deception and fraud. But if you did, then we would stop the massing theft through fraud that is money printing, aka inflation, aka fraud; selling one thing, delivering something of lesser value, dilution, theft by deception.
Then our benevolent government wouldn’t have to spend any money, because the value of labor for the homeless would allow them to have dignity that our class steals and robs them of, regardless of the government alms we throw them. Even the government money is not even our own money, but overwhelmingly also yet more of other peoples money that was stolen and defrauded through debt, taxes, and money printing.
We are all no different than Escobar that was relatively generous with his money to keep the vile enterprise going on the backs of people’s suffering.
Yes, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people who do not actually want to solve a problem, they just want to feel good about themselves.
This comes off as just a rant against the boogyman fed which prints money and creates inflation.
This is always the justification for socialist-style programs. It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading. What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find yourself with a lot more homeless than you used to have. Your studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we've seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites more homeless.
"Government should do its job at the country level" shouldn't be some taboo or undefendable position.
It is a crazy dense and expensive area. There are cities that would gladly take in low skill workers who are subsidized by the government. Do they offer them transfers and housing in other cities?
Vs.
Every one of us needs a roof over their heads.
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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.
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.
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.
It's easy to get someone to stop taking drugs. It's much harder to stop them from picking the addiction back up once you let them go.
Addiction is usually the result of other mental problems. It's a coping mechanism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let's not pretend society really wants to hug these people or employers want to hire them.
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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.
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.
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.
I visited the Bay Area a number of times and only met one person who was born locally. "Not even Americans!" in many cases.
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.
Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country.
Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind housing.
Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland).
There’s no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private. And that’s a whole clusterfuck that seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/427...
That salary is on par with a senior engineer at a big tech company who, one might reasonably argue, does not contribute a similar good to the world.
A lot of these programs are hard to stop paying into once you start. Say you are a political leader and you try to solve homelessness by pouring $X per year into some new program. 5 years later it's clear the program is not effective. However, if you axe the program, good luck getting re-elected since you've now made it very easy for your opponent to lambaste you ("Hundreds of society's most vulnerable brace themselves as Governor X seeks to axe homeless program").
This seems to not reflect reality in the US. There is strong local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor people or worse homeless, leading to tight zoning and rejection of projects during the byzantine approval process. If the government tries to build something, the EPA (environmental protection act) also allows anyone to request that a environmental impact study needs to take place. The study can take about a year and there are no teeth, other than causing delay and cost through the study. Nothing needs to change based on the findings, it's just another way to drag things out and increase cost on projects someone doesn't like.
The US used to do that. It led to high-rise ghettos.[1] And that was before drugs were big.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes
It's a LOT more than making affordable housing available. Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both. Some are also homeless in large part because of criminal records. Many many difficult social problems to fix before it's just a matter of affordability.
If drug addicts don't have to pay rent, then they do drug addict stuff within the premises of their house. It doesn't solve the mental health crisis, but it does solve tents in public areas.
Secondly, it controls for for gateway drug scenarios. Eventually, a large percent chronically homeless & mentally ill people turn into addicts. But, if they have a roof over they shoulders, they aren't pushed into that life as hard as if they were living in a tent.
Well, that’s simple. Most of the money goes to politically well connected non-profits with missions around alleviating homelessness. The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away and everybody at that non-profit loses their jobs. I’m not specifically accusing anyone of corruption, but the incentives aren’t good.
That actually isn't what happens at all though. When we handle this at the state level, spending on homelessness just makes that state more attractive to the homeless in other states and exacerbates the problem.
Because for them, problem is their opportunity.
True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.
Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew.
If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.
We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.
That is absolutely not true. Not even close.
Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness.
One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about.
Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status.
In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them.
Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.
Managerial bloat. The more money we give, the more they grow.
You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.
It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.
Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.
One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.
That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.
And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.
The state spends money to help the homeless.
The broad availability of help for the homeless increases the likelihood that homeless will migrate to and stay in the state.
Repeat.
> 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.
Edit: Reply to paisawalla
May I point out the post I replied to had no data. If you have data that addresses the two points you made, please post them. It is always easy to nitpick data when you have none.
Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.
I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.
Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.
Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.
Towards more homelessness. They are subsidizing it. Literally paying people money to be homeless.
A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting people in them.
Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live.
Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption, where organizations that provide 'services' have good relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness" concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put them into homes.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.
SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites.
Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services.
Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to be better than a tent under a bridge.
Plenty of peoples in the WSJ story were not "service resistant"
The services are inadequate
25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets. We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated.
I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should be supported in a much different way than we support drug addicts.
How many of those 25% would've died on the street? Do you have any numbers to put that into context?
A 54% reduction in homeless on the streets sounds like a great start to me, though, as do people dying in a room instead of on a sidewalk.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/02/15/opioid-treatment...
You are cherry picking statistics
Housing first has been shown over and over again to be a better solution than expecting people to recover their lives before they get any help
What are your counterfactuals? How many die with no help?
Where do those numbers even come from?
Basically I am calling this out as disinformation. Lies
In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse).
For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse, treatment first is the only viable solution, but we're not legally allowed to force someone into treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger to themselves or others.
There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job".
It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.
Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?
[0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-home...
Allocate some land for this, let people create their own community/ies. Isn't America supposed to be about freedom?
Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
> Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first" has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot for them.
I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from that $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no they do drugs?! like the heaviest drug users I've ever met aren't white collar.
Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary spending every month.
Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that would be life changing to the average american household per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn't change lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been traumatized by homelessness and stuck.
In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new wife.
A common misconception - but money is not housing. There are no extra 1BD units available. We could use this money to outbid other people to put the current homeless in those places, displacing others and somewhat increasing overall rent prices (and/or waiting lists). But I don't think that's what you intend.
In the end, if we want more people to have housing, then we have to allow more housing to be built. It's not (just) a money problem.
(I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a bunch of other things - who knows).
https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homel...
Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies.
The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then their political ambitions likely get killed.
This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost effective with worse outcomes.
My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?
Conservatives are not the problem.
Uhhh it’s been a while since I lived in the states but isn’t homelessness much much worse in states dominated by liberals?
To play the devil's advocate to my sibling commentators: if you equate "conservative" politics and NIMBY politics, this claim could certainly hold some substance. (The argument: NIMBY = conservative in the sense that they oppose change.)
Also, just off the cuff I'm going to bet the overhead/fraud rate is more like 50% than 10%. Basis: think of the overhead regular companies budget, about 30% of salary.
I'm trying to figure out the basis for your argument... surely you aren't suggesting that places like California want to do this but can't seem to overcome the conservative opposition in the state legislature, right? :)
See also : https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-inpractice-0... (one of the most conservative states in the country has been trying different housing first strategies for nearly two decades)
With no data to back it up, I suspect it's really older folks who don't want the housing to be built. And I think the psychology of it might be preserving things the way the are or used to be. I'd be interested to see some data that supports/refutes this speculation.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.
I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just “oh well, what can we do?” About all this. There is a LOT we can do, we don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to put up with any of this.
It turns out that when you construct a society in which a "cost of living" is a normal concept, people without money are largely excluded from said society. You've excluded them from malls, shopping centers, museums, restaurants, streets, government buildings, and anywhere else you can. They can't get educated, they can't train themselves, they can't get access to healthcare, because we've all decided that those services are only available to those with money. Now they find themselves in the parks, because it's the only place they're allowed to legally exist. But I guess that's not enough, because you and the parent poster would prefer to "concentrate" them in desert "camps" as your "final solution" to homelessness. Really amazing to see the masks off here.
We offer many, many hands to those who are down on their luck and need help. I personally donate to several every year. For those willing, there's a publicly-funded escalator to a better life. But the ones who used to shit on my sidewalk, throw beer cans in my flower beds, and graffiti everything in site (I've since moved out of the city) aren't interested in taking the escalator. They don't care about anyone. They only care about their next fix. They need to be involuntarily incarcerated. If they won't participate in the usual programs, then ship them to the desert. I just don't care anymore.
It only takes few people to ruin experience for all people.
We used to have asylums. Maybe it’s time to bring these back and house these people in them with whatever medication can sedate them. Not saying bring back the lobotomy but maybe we institutionalize people that are obviously crazy?!
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.
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.
THIS ^^^