4 ms·

For all the shelters, clinics, and every other initiative to help homeless people "get back on their feet," we shouldn't forget two simple facts: 1: San Franci

For all the shelters, clinics, and every other initiative to help homeless people "get back on their feet," we shouldn't forget two simple facts: 1: San Francisco is a great city and the winters won't kill you, so it's an attractive destination for everyone, especially the homeless. 2: Some people prefer to be homeless. No amount of detox or "good drugs" will ever change them. I have a radical idea: pay homeless people to be homeless somewhere else. Give them a monthly income, distributed at a location outside of the city (and has to be picked up in person so people can't game the system), under the condition that they are never to return unless they can show any proof of residence. They can request limited exceptions to visit friends and so on, but once their city visa expires, they leave on their own recognizance. Honor system with one strike to lose their benefit permenantly. Tech folk, instead of sinking tens of millions into fucking glyphy and Yo and other pointless shit that won't make money, try investing in this instead. You don't need a government program to make this happen, just money. You can use arrest records or other public info to spot violators, and it's not like you're preventing their freedom of movement, you're just giving them an incentive to keep getting free money. Doesn't even have to be that much. Life is cheap when you don't pay rent.

mindslight 11y ago
You might be on to something here, in that the incentives are completely changed. Rather than cooperatively funding programs, adversarially fund programs - create competition for who can serve the homeless the best, elsewhere. The "enforcement" aspect isn't even really necessary - just give out this income often enough and far enough away from the city that traveling back and forth every time is impractical. I'm imagining SF opening a sizable homeless shelter in LA, busing people down there, and then giving them some sort of BI there. (Yes, such busing has gotten a bad wrap, but bear with the thought experiment). Meanwhile, LA can do the same thing to get rid of their homeless. Each city would be incentivized to spend more, efficiently, on maintaining shelters in each other's cities. There's a gradient where infrastructure-poor towns in the middle of nowhere would be cheaper. And who would want to move to a majority homeless city to own/work business to serve them? But could this be softened with the return trip being guaranteed, contractually obligated with independent oversight?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  The important distinction is that this plan should be privately funded. Otherwise it would take vital public money that's used to help people truly in need. Everybody falls on hard times. Some more than worse. The mayor of my town was homeless for a while, and he truly brings a sympathetic ear to the stubborn and persistent problems with homelessness (not just the homeless themselves). My idea is that people on the margins of productive (job-having, self-supporting, tax-paying) society should live there, but in doing so, they are provided the resources to maintain their dignity and, if they so choose, find the help to rejoin productive society.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    I think the core of the idea could work with public money as well. In the short term, I agree it's not wise to divert public money to such an experiment. But if it worked over the long term, it would align incentives better. Currently, a city spending more money on its homeless population creates positive feedback - more people come for the better benefits. It's in no single city's interest to spend too much, especially if they have amenities such as nice weather. What we need is negative feedback so the system balances out. Harsher policing provides this, but is rightly frowned upon and the spending ultimately ends up wasted. Funding homeless in other cities would also set up negative feedback, but with the spending actually benefiting the homeless.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      I disagree that spending on the homeless incentivizes homelessness, or homeless migration. If the benefits were wildly better one city over, maybe, but honestly the biggest thing is the weather: winter doesn't kill you in California. Everything else is secondary. Homeless people live where they do for the same reason renters or homeowners do: friends, family, history, allure, and so on. If, say, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, announced and financed the biggest homeless benefit program in history (they won't, but bear with me), then would California's homeless people leave their warm, blue skies? Would homeless people in New York uproot and move halfway across the continent? As an aside, my idea wasn't to take homeless people in SF and transplant them to LA, but to edge them out to elsewhere in the Bay Area. If the whole region took on SF's lead, then the other counties would do the same until there was a location with either enough space/tolerance for the homeless, or a population that couldn't or wouldn't join to pay in the same benefit scheme. And if they want to move back, they can use their regular income to help them get a job and a place to live. Interestingly, the SF Gate reported that there are around 7,000 homeless people in San Francisco. If each of them were paid $500 each month to avoid the city, that cost would tally to $42 million per year. For the legions of wealthy tech workers and venture capitalists in San Francisco, that would barely be a drop in the bucket. For cleaner, safer, and more pleasant streets, is that not a worthwhile investment?

mindslight 11y ago

You might be on to something here, in that the incentives are completely changed. Rather than cooperatively funding programs, adversarially fund programs - create competition for who can serve the homeless the best, elsewhere. The "enforcement" aspect isn't even really necessary - just give out this income often enough and far enough away from the city that traveling back and forth every time is impractical. I'm imagining SF opening a sizable homeless shelter in LA, busing people down there, and then giving them some sort of BI there. (Yes, such busing has gotten a bad wrap, but bear with the thought experiment). Meanwhile, LA can do the same thing to get rid of their homeless. Each city would be incentivized to spend more, efficiently, on maintaining shelters in each other's cities. There's a gradient where infrastructure-poor towns in the middle of nowhere would be cheaper. And who would want to move to a majority homeless city to own/work business to serve them? But could this be softened with the return trip being guaranteed, contractually obligated with independent oversight?

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
The important distinction is that this plan should be privately funded. Otherwise it would take vital public money that's used to help people truly in need. Everybody falls on hard times. Some more than worse. The mayor of my town was homeless for a while, and he truly brings a sympathetic ear to the stubborn and persistent problems with homelessness (not just the homeless themselves). My idea is that people on the margins of productive (job-having, self-supporting, tax-paying) society should live there, but in doing so, they are provided the resources to maintain their dignity and, if they so choose, find the help to rejoin productive society.
- mindslight 11y ago
  I think the core of the idea could work with public money as well. In the short term, I agree it's not wise to divert public money to such an experiment. But if it worked over the long term, it would align incentives better. Currently, a city spending more money on its homeless population creates positive feedback - more people come for the better benefits. It's in no single city's interest to spend too much, especially if they have amenities such as nice weather. What we need is negative feedback so the system balances out. Harsher policing provides this, but is rightly frowned upon and the spending ultimately ends up wasted. Funding homeless in other cities would also set up negative feedback, but with the spending actually benefiting the homeless.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    I disagree that spending on the homeless incentivizes homelessness, or homeless migration. If the benefits were wildly better one city over, maybe, but honestly the biggest thing is the weather: winter doesn't kill you in California. Everything else is secondary. Homeless people live where they do for the same reason renters or homeowners do: friends, family, history, allure, and so on. If, say, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, announced and financed the biggest homeless benefit program in history (they won't, but bear with me), then would California's homeless people leave their warm, blue skies? Would homeless people in New York uproot and move halfway across the continent? As an aside, my idea wasn't to take homeless people in SF and transplant them to LA, but to edge them out to elsewhere in the Bay Area. If the whole region took on SF's lead, then the other counties would do the same until there was a location with either enough space/tolerance for the homeless, or a population that couldn't or wouldn't join to pay in the same benefit scheme. And if they want to move back, they can use their regular income to help them get a job and a place to live. Interestingly, the SF Gate reported that there are around 7,000 homeless people in San Francisco. If each of them were paid $500 each month to avoid the city, that cost would tally to $42 million per year. For the legions of wealthy tech workers and venture capitalists in San Francisco, that would barely be a drop in the bucket. For cleaner, safer, and more pleasant streets, is that not a worthwhile investment?