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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. E

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
    If neighborhood/history/allure are important, how would the outer bay area be different than LA? I would expect most friends would also be homeless, so they could move as well. And I would think city density is important, to partake in a better economy of community/trashing/begging/stores. $500/mo would be a "wildly better benefit", no? And around that magnitude, the feasibility of building proper shelters is on the horizon. What I'm really driving at here is a way to partially fund the homeless problem (phrased in terms of getting them out of your city), that then bootstraps itself into a way of fully funding the homeless. I doubt anybody really wants people to be living on the(ir) streets, they just aren't willing to jump into paying the full cost to change that.

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
  If neighborhood/history/allure are important, how would the outer bay area be different than LA? I would expect most friends would also be homeless, so they could move as well. And I would think city density is important, to partake in a better economy of community/trashing/begging/stores. $500/mo would be a "wildly better benefit", no? And around that magnitude, the feasibility of building proper shelters is on the horizon. What I'm really driving at here is a way to partially fund the homeless problem (phrased in terms of getting them out of your city), that then bootstraps itself into a way of fully funding the homeless. I doubt anybody really wants people to be living on the(ir) streets, they just aren't willing to jump into paying the full cost to change that.