6 ms·

Well, that's great, then. It seems like a liberal calling card but appeals to everyone's desire to save money while providing actually useful social services.

• lintiness 11y ago
  political arguments against anything these days are emotional reactions to parties and politicians rather than policy. people need to turn off the cable news and live less angry lives.
  • kifler 11y ago
    I think most people would argue that they had to pay for their housing but here we have people getting it for free.
  • athenot 11y ago
    ...and get to know some of the homeless on a personal level. Seriously, this is a human issue. We somehow look on these individuals as if they were almost non-human, yet they have powerful stories and painful experiences. I'm not doing a good job at that but I try to make it a point to reach outside of my fully-customized bubble, and engage other people who could use some respect and human dignity. My impact is minimal in terms of numbers but chatting for 10 min with someone on the street can really make their day. Who knows, if it happens enough, that person may regain the courage it takes to get back in society and reach out to services that are more competent than I at helping in the details.
    • lintiness 11y ago
      a huge number of homeless are mentally ill and/or have serious substance abuse problems. re-acclimating can be very difficult. (and NO, i'm not suggesting we not try)
• zymhan 11y ago
  "We don't want to give people free houses just because they're too lazy to work" or some shit.
  • emblem21 11y ago
    ...or why should I work so hard to pay SF rent when I can be homeless and get free housing?
    • foldr 11y ago
      Obviously because you'd rather have the housing that you could obtain by working and paying rent, which would be better.
      • iofj 11y ago
        Since most workers in San Francisco don't work in tech, that's not true. At least not if you want to live in San Francisco. The choice is a tent or a 2 hour commute, which may cost to much given service worker's pay. The only solution is way more housing.
        • foldr 11y ago
          I agree with you that more housing is needed, but come on -- no-one prefers living in a tent to a 2 hour commute.
          • iofj 11y ago
            True, but clearly there's people preferring a mobile home.
    • jrochkind1 11y ago
      I mean, 'you' (the speaker) could quit your job and become homeless and try it? I strongly suspect you'd prefer your original course.
• wfo 11y ago
  The political argument against it is "I don't want a single dime of my money going to worthless scumbag lowlifes who are too lazy to get a job" or "anything the government does is by definition wasteful, the private sector needs to handle this problem like all problems" -- the same one that galvanizes the right against welfare, regulations, healthcare, etc. The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones. There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.
  • lintiness 11y ago
    wrong. conservatives in the states are more than happy to donate to programs that help the homeless and mentally ill, they're consistently the most charitable americans. they do tend not to like taxes and government waste, however. it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.
    • lmm 11y ago
      > it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government. Do you have examples of effective non-government solutions? Looking at my own country my impression is that government is far more effective than charities (in America or elsewhere) on this issue.
  • webXL 11y ago
    Do those "extreme" conservatives have any political power in the cities where this is the biggest problem? What about the liberal yuppies who live closest to the problem and who are most vocal about it?
• dclowd9901 11y ago
  There's no more political arguments to it. Conservatives, anymore, are simply a tool to attempt to dismantle the government, full stop. They simply don't believe we should have a government, mostly because they don't like paying taxes.
  • lintiness 11y ago
    you live in a very simple place. "conservatives" (this term cracks me up) love government when it works, fear it when it doesn't. they tend to trust / prefer private institutions and solutions to public. american "liberals" prefer public solutions to private. quit disparaging people who disagree with you. attempt to understand their real motivations rather than harping against some lame stereotype (that doesn't even make sense). that's the way to progress and solving our problems.
• hluska 11y ago
  The political argument against HF comes down to the fact that it may not actually work very well. People opposed to HF tend to argue: 1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.) 2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.) 3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:) 4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs. I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems. (source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)
  • monknomo 11y ago
    As to point 2, if there are enough homeless people in an area to turn an apartment building into a slum, there is already a de facto slum. It's just that it's a slum made of tents under a highway, rather than in a building.
    • hluska 11y ago
      Nicely said! This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps: - functionally blind - landlords The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless. And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs. Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business. But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!
• Spooky23 11y ago
  "Homeless first" undermines the normal eligibility cycle for public housing. It also destroys the communities in these developments. If you find a man screaming obscenities while taking a dump on the sidewalk distasteful, I'll assure you that the people who get stuck living next to him share your reaction -- except they can't walk away. So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed. It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.
  • VonGuard 11y ago
    Also, I would be REALLY pissed if I lived in a town where I had to struggle to make rent on a place I don't own every month, and the city is giving away free permanent houses to folks who don't have jobs or pay rent... I mean, I want homeless people to have homes, but if they're getting one for free and the economy continues to have housing prices way out of the reach of someone like me, I would be fucking pissed.
    • Domenic_S 11y ago
      It already happens. My first apartment was a studio in a new downtown building that, with parking, I paid about 1/2 my monthly income for. Then I met my neighbor, who claimed to have been hurt by a city bus ("they closed the door on my arm"). She had a 2-br place with a terrace, and paid less than half of what I was paying.
    • k33n 11y ago
      This viewpoint pretty well summarizes why homeless people aren't helped. Homeless people are viewed as "what happens when you don't have a job or stop paying your bills". Trust me, the fact that you work hard and pay your bills isn't what's keeping you off the street. It's your (relative) mental health and your network.
• patrick_99 11y ago
  Another issue is the level of government providing the solution. If one town gives all homeless people a place to live, that could act to attract homeless people from other towns. So the burden of fixing a whole region's homeless problem falls on one town.
• shin_lao 11y ago
  Problem is that people just a bit richer than homeless might complain about not having free housing, too.
  • brbsix 11y ago
    See welfare cliff. Why struggle to afford housing when a slight reduction in your income (or whatever the criteria) could net free housing? I can certainly see the appeal.