13 ms·

How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness (2015)

140 points by swsieber 10y ago

iambateman 10y ago
homelessness is tough. In our medium size city (Columbia, SC) we have roughly 1,400 homeless and no one (myself included) seems to know what to do. I feel like affordable/free housing has been tried before, and you end up with "projects" with a drug problem. I wonder how they expect this will be different. Am I off here? Does it not seem naive to say: "they're homeless, so let's just give them an apartment and say our 'homeless' rate dropped"? As if that was the essential problem? What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work... I'm not saying it sounds like a bad solution, but it seems like a bandaid on a gaping wound.
- erentz 10y ago
  Well now they are not homeless. They have a home. So yes the homeless rate drops. Now that they have stability, the security of a warm home to come home to. A safe place to sleep. Maybe you'll have more luck addressing the other problems that affect them. I wish people wouldn't latch onto drug addiction as the first thing that must be solved, you're really picking the hardest problem to tackle first and trying to do it in the hardest possible environment to recover. Remember there are plenty of functioning drug addicts in the world wearing suits to their day jobs on Wall Street and the like.
- Frondo 10y ago
  Something this article didn't really get into that I've seen elsewhere: Utah also assigns a caseworker to these people, to help them work on their problems (drugs, drinking, whatever). It's a little more hands-on than just handing over some keys to an apartment; they seem to want this program to work, to have results that stick.
  - swsieber 10y ago
    Part of me wonders how much of this program is influenced by Mormon culture. There's this thing known as ward council where they discuss people in the ward (congregation) who have unmet needs, and what can be done to help. Reading the article the similarity popped out to me right away. This program seems like an extension of that on a grander scale.
- Chathamization 10y ago
  > you end up with "projects" with a drug problem You could just put them in high quality apartments and give them a stipend. The current proposal for a "projects" style homeless shelter where I am would have each unit cost $4,500 per month, with 90% of the units not having a private bathroom (and most not having a full kitchen). For that price you could easily afford a high end apartment and give the people a large stipend. And if you spread the units out across the city so that each apartment building only had 1-2 homeless families, you'd avoid the problems of concentrating poverty.
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  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Great, but then you'll notice that many other people also like to have a high quality apartment and a stipend. Eventually, you have to give it to a lot of people, and those who work on low salary and pay their rent for a not-so-high-quality apartment will not be happy and many of them will also acquire a status where they deserve a high quality apartment and a stipend.
    - jonlucc 10y ago
      If high quality is defined as having a private bathroom, I doubt you'll see a lot of people opting for it.
      - ptaipale 10y ago
        Then it's probably not "high quality" but more like "decent". However, I don't know about American cities specifically, but even over here in North European socialist utopias, free housing and a "stipend" does attract people in a way that makes low-wage workers unhappy (and even give up / reluctant to take up jobs).
- foldr 10y ago
  >What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work... We have to find a way to house people who have mental health problems and drug addictions. If you look in any rich neighborhood you'll find lots of people who meet this description living in relative comfort.
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- michaelchisari 10y ago
  > you end up with "projects" with a drug problem. That's why you don't house everyone together. This is something that America's War on Poverty got very wrong. You have to decentralize extreme poverty.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  The problem with your theories is that actual evidence says the programs work far better than anything else we've tried. (I don't intend that to be mean or glib). These programs typically assign a caseworker who gets to know the homeless people and forms a relationship with them. The early period involves a lot of hand-holding and helping the homeless figure out (or re-discover) how to live a productive adult life. Most people who end up homeless turn to drugs, prostitution, and have any existing mental problems hugely exacerbated AFTER they become homeless. In other cases it is some other underlying situation (abusive childhood, etc) that triggers drug use that leads to homelessness. There's also a strong selection effect: many people who become homeless quickly attempt to find employment and a new place to live. Those who don't get out of being homeless quickly become unemployable and thus are locked into the cycle. As a society we seem to be stuck in this Victorian-era meme that moral failure brings calamity upon people (aka the Just World fallacy). That applies to success the same as failure... being ambitious and smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition to become successful. If Mark Zuckerberg got hit by a drunk driver (through no fault of his own) and became a paraplegic while at Harvard he wouldn't be a billionaire today. If he hadn't gotten into Harvard would he have had the connections to get funding and start Facebook? A million things entirely outside his control had to go right for him to be successful. It was a combination of his character, circumstances, and pure luck. If you don't have all three you won't be successful. Similarly it doesn't take much weakness or bad luck to completely ruin someone's life.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Tl;dr well organized paternalism which also excludes (or at least deprioritizes) the antisocial. Kind of the opposite of everything that is popular with the HN crowd.
leonroy 10y ago
Years ago I read about an excellent effort in Italy to reduce the homeless problems there. They examined what made folk homeless and what kept them there. A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness. One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use. Verification could be supplied by the county.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use. They (basically) already are. USPS provides free mailing service for people who don't have a fixed address, and you can use that as your street address (unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address). They'll hold onto any mail addressed to you for 30 days.
    - AckSyn 10y ago
      Also, many USPS locations allow you to use the address of the building and to append the P.O. Box similar to an apartment number.
    - lobster_johnson 10y ago
      I believe you're referring to general delivery, known in the rest of the world as poste restante. (Fixed addresses are a fairly modern invention; poste restante used to be the norm before individually delivered mail became the norm.)
chimeracoder 10y ago
The article mentions that they tried this in NYC. Unfortunately, the same approach doesn't work as well in a city that's almost 100 times as large as SLC, and which has a much more competitive real estate market. The program has ended up being quite expensive to run, and it's not actually cost effective, to the point where homeless advocates actually criticize the program's in effectiveness. It's also caused negative impact for other residents in the buildings or nearby areas. Depending on what the stipend provided by the government is and whether it's above or below market rate, landlords will either intentionally neglect and blight buildings in order to run them down, or they will refuse to rent to market tenants, with the knowledge that they can make more money from the stipends for homeless housing. This, of course, makes it more difficult to find housing and has the effect of driving prices upwards.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Do you have a source for this? It was my understanding that the program was being undermined by landlords illegally refusing to accept the rental vouchers, banking on the city being lax in its enforcement. A pretty good calculation given how in bed with the real estate industry every mayoral administration has been, even an ostensibly liberal one like DeBlasio's (see the recent Rivington housing scandal). Seems to me housing first doesn't work in New York because the politics around telling real estate are more corrupt. http://abc7ny.com/news/the-investigators-homeless-struggling-to-find-takers-for-rent-voucher-program/1123922/ http://abc7ny.com/news/the-investigators-homeless-struggling...
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    Yes, there are plenty. Here's the first hit on Google: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlords-real-money-in-the-homeless.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlord... > The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays many times the amount the rooms would usually rent for — spending over $3,000 a month for each threadbare room without a bathroom or kitchen — because of an acute shortage in shelters for homeless men and women. Indeed, the amount the city pays.. has encouraged Mr. Lapes to switch business models and become a major private operator of homeless shelters. He is by most measures the city’s largest and owns or leases about 20 of the 231 shelters citywide. Most of the other shelters and residences are run by the city or by nonprofit agencies, but his operation is profit-making, prompting criticism from advocates for the homeless and elected officials.
bjterry 10y ago
This title should be made less clickbaity, something like "Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness by 91 Percent with Housing First Model"
- dang 10y ago
  We've edited the title above to be less clickbaity.
saosebastiao 10y ago
I think this is an excellent solution, but it is one that won't be replicable by cities like NY, Seattle, or San Francisco until they fix their housing cost problems. If you think about it from a systems perspective, with inflows and outflows, you will begin to see the problem. 1) Inflows: higher housing costs increase the inflow into homelessness. Whether it is job loss, drug addiction, mental illness, or whatever...if you have higher housing costs, you are more likely to end up homeless. 2) Outflows: higher housing costs become a higher bar to leaving homelessness. Let's say someone can address, over time, their underlying cause to homelessness. That person will take longer to overcome the bar of housing costs in a high cost area than an equivalent person with lower housing cost bars to overcome. Both of these arguments seem obvious, almost tautological, but combined what you have is a higher rate of inflows, and a lower rate of outflows. This means two things: ceteris paribus, you have more homeless people, and the homeless people that you do have take longer to leave homelessness. Now take into account the fact that in high housing cost areas, housing costs more to build because land prices and construction prices are higher (even taking into account Eminent Domain), and you have: 1) More demand (in terms of quantity of people) for relief housing 2) Higher expected time of use of housing. 3) Higher cost of building housing. These factors are multiplicative, not additive. Combined, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of attaining the same success rate is two orders of magnitude higher in San Francisco than it is in Salt Lake City. Construction costs alone take care of your first order of magnitude...now multiply those by the higher inflow rates and outflow rates. This solution is obvious, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Salt Lake City never had to worry about it...San Francisco does.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  Worth noting, since you mention Seattle: Seattle actually ran a Housing First program, but it was limited in scope. It saw similar successes (again within its limited scope).
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    I'm familiar with it, but I'm not saying an equivalent program can't achieve equivalent success rate, I'm saying that an equivalent program will have an extremely disproportionate cost of implementation if housing costs are higher.
xyzzy4 10y ago
The reason there are so many homeless is because they can't build slums for themselves like in developing countries such as India. Living in a slum would be better than being homeless. But in America, the police would tear them down.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  This has come up on a number of HN posts about homelessness I've seen recently. I'm interested in the topic, and actively worked with an encampment in Seattle (Nickelsville) that intended to build permanent dwellings. They were inspired by Dignity Village in Portland. But like you say, their efforts were demolished. But surprisingly to me, the cops involved were openly apologetic and gave everyone involved an opportunity to leave rather than risk arrest or property confiscation. Do you have direct experience with homeless communities that have built dwellings for themselves? If so, can you talk about that experience?
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    I barely have any direct experience. I visited Occupy Boston when it was still around and saw their small tent city. I've been to India multiple times and have seen how the very poor live, but I haven't spoken to them. I'm mostly just interested in the topic a lot and have researched it on my own. When I was younger I used to have some homeless friends, but they didn't construct dwellings.
11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
I'll weigh in from a basic income perspective... I've held for a while that a homeless person getting into housing solves one of the biggest time sinks they have. Once the time is freed up, they are more comfortable, safer and can therefore sleep better, and they can think and make a plan to get re-integrated into mainstream society. Commenters note that 'housing first' does not work in larger cities like San Francisco and New York because of the cost of housing. Were a basic income in place, homeless persons would be more mobile and could afford basic accommodations in many more places. Therefore, they'd not be so attracted to more hospitable climates or cities with more homeless services. That would increase the options they'd have to move to less expensive housing.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  But that doesn't really matter, because in terms of politcal capital, UBI is never, ever going to happen.
  - wolf550e 10y ago
    Imagine our technology got so good that housing, clothing and feeding most of the population is affordable without raising taxes, as in Star Trek.
    - Coding_Cat 10y ago
      Or you know, real life. It's just a matter of priorities (and game theory).
    - themartorana 10y ago
      It will. My theory is that it comes from solar energy. As soon as electricity generation comes to a near-zero cost, and a huge part of manufacturing cost is energy, (and the other largest cost, humans, is also displaced) we start to rapidly move to a place where traditional economies as we know them start to crumble, and we are forced (perhaps kicking and screaming) to accept that we simply can't have Full Employment (maybe not even half). After that providing people with basic rights that include housing, healthcare, etc., becomes low-cost enough that not doing so is much more detrimental.
dang 10y ago
Another article on this, from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099784.
graupel 10y ago
I spend quite a bit of time in Utah and just want to reinforce that chronic homelessness is very different from 'the amount of homeless people you see on the streets' because the area around Pioneer Park is actually worse now than I've seen in years in terms of sheer number-of-homeless.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I have several friends who are homeless or who have been homeless. It's really difficult to overstate how hard it is to get back out of homelessness, once you reach that point, without significant outside help. Think of all of the stuff most folks take for granted that are pretty much mandatory in most US cities in order to get and keep a job: 1. ID. So many of the homeless folks I know have had significant trouble obtaining ID after losing it or having it stolen, or having never had one because they left home at a very young age, etc. I can't count the number of conversations I've had trying to assist folks get an ID. Our governments don't make it easy (you need at least birth certificate and Social Security card, and some sort of mail showing where you live in some cases). For people without cooperative family or with no living parents, this step is very tough. It's stupid to think that lack of a tiny thing like ID is why so many people are without work and without homes, but, it's a reality. 2. Transportation. If you have no car in most US cities, it's hard to have a job. This one reason metropolitan areas are so much more densely populated by homeless folks; mass transit tends to be most accessible in the city center. 3. Staying clean. Would you hire someone who smells bad or looks dirty for any job? Homeless folks feel invisible because people don't want to be near dirty/smelly people of indeterminate mental health. Even if someone is perfectly able to do a job, being dirty is a guarantee they won't get the job. 4. No reliable way to reach them, if someone does decide to hire them. When I hear/see someone being hostile to a homeless or poor person because they are lucky enough to have a smart phone (I guess because a phone is an expensive thing), I'm just aghast. How the hell do they expect a homeless person to get out of homelessness without a phone, email, and a way to get online? So many low-level jobs have online application processes and require interaction via email and web in order to get the job. 5. Not getting a decent night's sleep, ever. Without a home, sleeping is a challenge every single day. If there are enough beds in the shelters (never the case in any city I've lived in), they have to be in the shelter by a certain time and have to be out very early (6AM is the "checkout time" at many shelters). This does double harm. The inflexible schedule prevents folks from holding jobs that conflict with that strict schedule, like second shift and night shift work, which often pays reasonably well, and has low barriers to entry. And, it also means they probably are running on an hour or two less sleep than a human actually needs to thrive. I hung out in downtown Eugene recently, and I was told that there was at least one fight, every single night. One broke out across the street within an hour of that conversation. I don't know that poor sleep is the cause of the frequent violence, but I'm confident it's a major contributing factor (and the science on sleep deprivation backs that theory up). Now, these were street kids, who don't go to shelters because the rules are too strict for them, and they sleep in sleeping bags and tents, but they, too, aren't getting enough sleep. In short, having a home makes a huge difference in nearly every element of chronic poverty, and that, paired with a consistent income, are the things that most indicate whether someone will be able to become a self-sufficient functioning member of society again. This is a great idea, and it's awesome that Utah has had such great success with it. I hope more cities and states implement these ideas.
davidf18 10y ago
Much of homelessness is caused by the high cost of housing (SF, NYC, LA, Boston, DC, London, ...) which itself is a result of "market failures" of "economic rents" which are the use of politics to create artificial scarcity. In this case, it is the use of zoning density restrictions and the overuse of historic landmark status. These restrictions make rent and the purchase of homes more expensive to the benefit of landlords. Fix the market failure, fix the zoning rules that create artificial scarcity through politics, and you will do much more to create affordable housing. See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, Build Big, Bill an article which explains the high cost of housing is caused for the reasons I stated. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.1913739 http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
grahamburger 10y ago
Oh hey, I've been to that shelter. I live in (and grew up in) Utah. My Aunt is severely mentally ill and homeless and relies on the Road Home shelter, I've visited her there a few times. They are doing good work, although being homeless is still pretty shitty, obviously. The hardest part is that the state could take much better care of her if she would allow herself to be diagnosed as handicapped due to her mental illness, but she doesn't believe that she's mentally ill. And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive. I don't really know where she's at now, we only have fleeting contact with her. EDIT: A sad/curious anecdote - at one time she was placed in an apartment. I don't know the details but it was probably using the programs outlined in the article. She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. As I understand she believed that she owned the apartment complex and could not understand why the managers would not let her make decisions, so she lit it on fire.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive. Counter-productive is an empirical question, but why is forcing treatment always unethical? > ...She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. ...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible? Often people on the street are at least committing fraud (lying for food, bus fare, cash, etc.). I understand that people do what they need to for survival (at least on their terms), but there is an actual cost to that. For instance, if someone actually lost their wallet and needed fare home, they have to compete with people who say they haven't eaten in days but actually don't want professional help (and may even be unfit to make that decision in the first place). The information asymmetry is enormous in this sort of interaction. To reiterate, the people getting conned aren't the biggest victims here; it's the people who have to deal with a jaded audience and fraudulent sob stories when $20, bus fare, or a prepaid phone is legitimately their biggest need. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to counterpoints about this, but it just doesn't make sense to me that the government isn't responsible for people who can't (or won't) take care of themselves. I'm talking haven't showered in weeks; open sores on their feet, faces, and bodies; etc. Literally no other group has (or should have!) the power to require someone to get care. If we say it's not the government's job, we're saying it's nobody's job. I'm willing to hear other thoughts on this. My current conclusion is that the status quo is ethically unconscionable but politically impossible to do anything about, but maybe I'm missing something.
wichsen 10y ago
During my 10 year stint living in Utah, I frequently read about homeless people being found frozen to death in parks during the winter. A really sad reality for out-of-luck folks in freezing regions.
ben_jones 10y ago
Is there any kind of communication network for homeless, homeless advocates, homeless volunteers, etc. to communicate various local initiatives that have proven productive in improving the lives of homeless people?
yalogin 10y ago
Nevada is probably putting their homeless on a bus and sending them to Utah. Not being funny here, they got caught doing that in the past.
equity 10y ago
The following blog argues that there is sloppy accounting in the claimed 90+% reduction of homelessness. "Although overall homelessness has actually increased slightly over the past decade in Utah, such a large reduction in chronic homelessness is still an impressive achievement. But is it real? Unfortunately, no. I spent some time studying Utah’s data and found that the miraculous 91 percent reduction in chronic homelessness appears to be driven by changes in how people were counted, rather than by how many there were." http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9380860 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9380860

140 points by swsieber 10y ago

homelessness is tough. In our medium size city (Columbia, SC) we have roughly 1,400 homeless and no one (myself included) seems to know what to do. I feel like affordable/free housing has been tried before, and you end up with "projects" with a drug problem. I wonder how they expect this will be different. Am I off here? Does it not seem naive to say: "they're homeless, so let's just give them an apartment and say our 'homeless' rate dropped"? As if that was the essential problem? What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work... I'm not saying it sounds like a bad solution, but it seems like a bandaid on a gaping wound.

erentz 10y ago
Well now they are not homeless. They have a home. So yes the homeless rate drops. Now that they have stability, the security of a warm home to come home to. A safe place to sleep. Maybe you'll have more luck addressing the other problems that affect them. I wish people wouldn't latch onto drug addiction as the first thing that must be solved, you're really picking the hardest problem to tackle first and trying to do it in the hardest possible environment to recover. Remember there are plenty of functioning drug addicts in the world wearing suits to their day jobs on Wall Street and the like.
Frondo 10y ago
Something this article didn't really get into that I've seen elsewhere: Utah also assigns a caseworker to these people, to help them work on their problems (drugs, drinking, whatever). It's a little more hands-on than just handing over some keys to an apartment; they seem to want this program to work, to have results that stick.
- swsieber 10y ago
  Part of me wonders how much of this program is influenced by Mormon culture. There's this thing known as ward council where they discuss people in the ward (congregation) who have unmet needs, and what can be done to help. Reading the article the similarity popped out to me right away. This program seems like an extension of that on a grander scale.
Chathamization 10y ago
> you end up with "projects" with a drug problem You could just put them in high quality apartments and give them a stipend. The current proposal for a "projects" style homeless shelter where I am would have each unit cost $4,500 per month, with 90% of the units not having a private bathroom (and most not having a full kitchen). For that price you could easily afford a high end apartment and give the people a large stipend. And if you spread the units out across the city so that each apartment building only had 1-2 homeless families, you'd avoid the problems of concentrating poverty.
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- ptaipale 10y ago
  Great, but then you'll notice that many other people also like to have a high quality apartment and a stipend. Eventually, you have to give it to a lot of people, and those who work on low salary and pay their rent for a not-so-high-quality apartment will not be happy and many of them will also acquire a status where they deserve a high quality apartment and a stipend.
  - jonlucc 10y ago
    If high quality is defined as having a private bathroom, I doubt you'll see a lot of people opting for it.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Then it's probably not "high quality" but more like "decent". However, I don't know about American cities specifically, but even over here in North European socialist utopias, free housing and a "stipend" does attract people in a way that makes low-wage workers unhappy (and even give up / reluctant to take up jobs).
foldr 10y ago
>What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work... We have to find a way to house people who have mental health problems and drug addictions. If you look in any rich neighborhood you'll find lots of people who meet this description living in relative comfort.
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michaelchisari 10y ago
> you end up with "projects" with a drug problem. That's why you don't house everyone together. This is something that America's War on Poverty got very wrong. You have to decentralize extreme poverty.
xenadu02 10y ago
The problem with your theories is that actual evidence says the programs work far better than anything else we've tried. (I don't intend that to be mean or glib). These programs typically assign a caseworker who gets to know the homeless people and forms a relationship with them. The early period involves a lot of hand-holding and helping the homeless figure out (or re-discover) how to live a productive adult life. Most people who end up homeless turn to drugs, prostitution, and have any existing mental problems hugely exacerbated AFTER they become homeless. In other cases it is some other underlying situation (abusive childhood, etc) that triggers drug use that leads to homelessness. There's also a strong selection effect: many people who become homeless quickly attempt to find employment and a new place to live. Those who don't get out of being homeless quickly become unemployable and thus are locked into the cycle. As a society we seem to be stuck in this Victorian-era meme that moral failure brings calamity upon people (aka the Just World fallacy). That applies to success the same as failure... being ambitious and smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition to become successful. If Mark Zuckerberg got hit by a drunk driver (through no fault of his own) and became a paraplegic while at Harvard he wouldn't be a billionaire today. If he hadn't gotten into Harvard would he have had the connections to get funding and start Facebook? A million things entirely outside his control had to go right for him to be successful. It was a combination of his character, circumstances, and pure luck. If you don't have all three you won't be successful. Similarly it doesn't take much weakness or bad luck to completely ruin someone's life.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

Tl;dr well organized paternalism which also excludes (or at least deprioritizes) the antisocial. Kind of the opposite of everything that is popular with the HN crowd.

leonroy 10y ago

Years ago I read about an excellent effort in Italy to reduce the homeless problems there. They examined what made folk homeless and what kept them there. A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness. One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.

icantdrive55 10y ago
I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use. Verification could be supplied by the county.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use. They (basically) already are. USPS provides free mailing service for people who don't have a fixed address, and you can use that as your street address (unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address). They'll hold onto any mail addressed to you for 30 days.
  - AckSyn 10y ago
    Also, many USPS locations allow you to use the address of the building and to append the P.O. Box similar to an apartment number.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    I believe you're referring to general delivery, known in the rest of the world as poste restante. (Fixed addresses are a fairly modern invention; poste restante used to be the norm before individually delivered mail became the norm.)

chimeracoder 10y ago

The article mentions that they tried this in NYC. Unfortunately, the same approach doesn't work as well in a city that's almost 100 times as large as SLC, and which has a much more competitive real estate market. The program has ended up being quite expensive to run, and it's not actually cost effective, to the point where homeless advocates actually criticize the program's in effectiveness. It's also caused negative impact for other residents in the buildings or nearby areas. Depending on what the stipend provided by the government is and whether it's above or below market rate, landlords will either intentionally neglect and blight buildings in order to run them down, or they will refuse to rent to market tenants, with the knowledge that they can make more money from the stipends for homeless housing. This, of course, makes it more difficult to find housing and has the effect of driving prices upwards.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Do you have a source for this? It was my understanding that the program was being undermined by landlords illegally refusing to accept the rental vouchers, banking on the city being lax in its enforcement. A pretty good calculation given how in bed with the real estate industry every mayoral administration has been, even an ostensibly liberal one like DeBlasio's (see the recent Rivington housing scandal). Seems to me housing first doesn't work in New York because the politics around telling real estate are more corrupt. http://abc7ny.com/news/the-investigators-homeless-struggling-to-find-takers-for-rent-voucher-program/1123922/ http://abc7ny.com/news/the-investigators-homeless-struggling...
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  Yes, there are plenty. Here's the first hit on Google: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlords-real-money-in-the-homeless.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/for-some-landlord... > The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays many times the amount the rooms would usually rent for — spending over $3,000 a month for each threadbare room without a bathroom or kitchen — because of an acute shortage in shelters for homeless men and women. Indeed, the amount the city pays.. has encouraged Mr. Lapes to switch business models and become a major private operator of homeless shelters. He is by most measures the city’s largest and owns or leases about 20 of the 231 shelters citywide. Most of the other shelters and residences are run by the city or by nonprofit agencies, but his operation is profit-making, prompting criticism from advocates for the homeless and elected officials.

bjterry 10y ago

This title should be made less clickbaity, something like "Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness by 91 Percent with Housing First Model"

dang 10y ago
We've edited the title above to be less clickbaity.

saosebastiao 10y ago

I think this is an excellent solution, but it is one that won't be replicable by cities like NY, Seattle, or San Francisco until they fix their housing cost problems. If you think about it from a systems perspective, with inflows and outflows, you will begin to see the problem. 1) Inflows: higher housing costs increase the inflow into homelessness. Whether it is job loss, drug addiction, mental illness, or whatever...if you have higher housing costs, you are more likely to end up homeless. 2) Outflows: higher housing costs become a higher bar to leaving homelessness. Let's say someone can address, over time, their underlying cause to homelessness. That person will take longer to overcome the bar of housing costs in a high cost area than an equivalent person with lower housing cost bars to overcome. Both of these arguments seem obvious, almost tautological, but combined what you have is a higher rate of inflows, and a lower rate of outflows. This means two things: ceteris paribus, you have more homeless people, and the homeless people that you do have take longer to leave homelessness. Now take into account the fact that in high housing cost areas, housing costs more to build because land prices and construction prices are higher (even taking into account Eminent Domain), and you have: 1) More demand (in terms of quantity of people) for relief housing 2) Higher expected time of use of housing. 3) Higher cost of building housing. These factors are multiplicative, not additive. Combined, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of attaining the same success rate is two orders of magnitude higher in San Francisco than it is in Salt Lake City. Construction costs alone take care of your first order of magnitude...now multiply those by the higher inflow rates and outflow rates. This solution is obvious, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Salt Lake City never had to worry about it...San Francisco does.

eyelidlessness 10y ago
Worth noting, since you mention Seattle: Seattle actually ran a Housing First program, but it was limited in scope. It saw similar successes (again within its limited scope).
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  I'm familiar with it, but I'm not saying an equivalent program can't achieve equivalent success rate, I'm saying that an equivalent program will have an extremely disproportionate cost of implementation if housing costs are higher.

xyzzy4 10y ago

The reason there are so many homeless is because they can't build slums for themselves like in developing countries such as India. Living in a slum would be better than being homeless. But in America, the police would tear them down.

eyelidlessness 10y ago
This has come up on a number of HN posts about homelessness I've seen recently. I'm interested in the topic, and actively worked with an encampment in Seattle (Nickelsville) that intended to build permanent dwellings. They were inspired by Dignity Village in Portland. But like you say, their efforts were demolished. But surprisingly to me, the cops involved were openly apologetic and gave everyone involved an opportunity to leave rather than risk arrest or property confiscation. Do you have direct experience with homeless communities that have built dwellings for themselves? If so, can you talk about that experience?
- xyzzy4 10y ago
  I barely have any direct experience. I visited Occupy Boston when it was still around and saw their small tent city. I've been to India multiple times and have seen how the very poor live, but I haven't spoken to them. I'm mostly just interested in the topic a lot and have researched it on my own. When I was younger I used to have some homeless friends, but they didn't construct dwellings.

11thEarlOfMar 10y ago

I'll weigh in from a basic income perspective... I've held for a while that a homeless person getting into housing solves one of the biggest time sinks they have. Once the time is freed up, they are more comfortable, safer and can therefore sleep better, and they can think and make a plan to get re-integrated into mainstream society. Commenters note that 'housing first' does not work in larger cities like San Francisco and New York because of the cost of housing. Were a basic income in place, homeless persons would be more mobile and could afford basic accommodations in many more places. Therefore, they'd not be so attracted to more hospitable climates or cities with more homeless services. That would increase the options they'd have to move to less expensive housing.

JBReefer 10y ago
But that doesn't really matter, because in terms of politcal capital, UBI is never, ever going to happen.
- wolf550e 10y ago
  Imagine our technology got so good that housing, clothing and feeding most of the population is affordable without raising taxes, as in Star Trek.
  - Coding_Cat 10y ago
    Or you know, real life. It's just a matter of priorities (and game theory).
  - themartorana 10y ago
    It will. My theory is that it comes from solar energy. As soon as electricity generation comes to a near-zero cost, and a huge part of manufacturing cost is energy, (and the other largest cost, humans, is also displaced) we start to rapidly move to a place where traditional economies as we know them start to crumble, and we are forced (perhaps kicking and screaming) to accept that we simply can't have Full Employment (maybe not even half). After that providing people with basic rights that include housing, healthcare, etc., becomes low-cost enough that not doing so is much more detrimental.

dang 10y ago

Another article on this, from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7099784.

graupel 10y ago

I spend quite a bit of time in Utah and just want to reinforce that chronic homelessness is very different from 'the amount of homeless people you see on the streets' because the area around Pioneer Park is actually worse now than I've seen in years in terms of sheer number-of-homeless.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I have several friends who are homeless or who have been homeless. It's really difficult to overstate how hard it is to get back out of homelessness, once you reach that point, without significant outside help. Think of all of the stuff most folks take for granted that are pretty much mandatory in most US cities in order to get and keep a job: 1. ID. So many of the homeless folks I know have had significant trouble obtaining ID after losing it or having it stolen, or having never had one because they left home at a very young age, etc. I can't count the number of conversations I've had trying to assist folks get an ID. Our governments don't make it easy (you need at least birth certificate and Social Security card, and some sort of mail showing where you live in some cases). For people without cooperative family or with no living parents, this step is very tough. It's stupid to think that lack of a tiny thing like ID is why so many people are without work and without homes, but, it's a reality. 2. Transportation. If you have no car in most US cities, it's hard to have a job. This one reason metropolitan areas are so much more densely populated by homeless folks; mass transit tends to be most accessible in the city center. 3. Staying clean. Would you hire someone who smells bad or looks dirty for any job? Homeless folks feel invisible because people don't want to be near dirty/smelly people of indeterminate mental health. Even if someone is perfectly able to do a job, being dirty is a guarantee they won't get the job. 4. No reliable way to reach them, if someone does decide to hire them. When I hear/see someone being hostile to a homeless or poor person because they are lucky enough to have a smart phone (I guess because a phone is an expensive thing), I'm just aghast. How the hell do they expect a homeless person to get out of homelessness without a phone, email, and a way to get online? So many low-level jobs have online application processes and require interaction via email and web in order to get the job. 5. Not getting a decent night's sleep, ever. Without a home, sleeping is a challenge every single day. If there are enough beds in the shelters (never the case in any city I've lived in), they have to be in the shelter by a certain time and have to be out very early (6AM is the "checkout time" at many shelters). This does double harm. The inflexible schedule prevents folks from holding jobs that conflict with that strict schedule, like second shift and night shift work, which often pays reasonably well, and has low barriers to entry. And, it also means they probably are running on an hour or two less sleep than a human actually needs to thrive. I hung out in downtown Eugene recently, and I was told that there was at least one fight, every single night. One broke out across the street within an hour of that conversation. I don't know that poor sleep is the cause of the frequent violence, but I'm confident it's a major contributing factor (and the science on sleep deprivation backs that theory up). Now, these were street kids, who don't go to shelters because the rules are too strict for them, and they sleep in sleeping bags and tents, but they, too, aren't getting enough sleep. In short, having a home makes a huge difference in nearly every element of chronic poverty, and that, paired with a consistent income, are the things that most indicate whether someone will be able to become a self-sufficient functioning member of society again. This is a great idea, and it's awesome that Utah has had such great success with it. I hope more cities and states implement these ideas.

davidf18 10y ago

Much of homelessness is caused by the high cost of housing (SF, NYC, LA, Boston, DC, London, ...) which itself is a result of "market failures" of "economic rents" which are the use of politics to create artificial scarcity. In this case, it is the use of zoning density restrictions and the overuse of historic landmark status. These restrictions make rent and the purchase of homes more expensive to the benefit of landlords. Fix the market failure, fix the zoning rules that create artificial scarcity through politics, and you will do much more to create affordable housing. See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, Build Big, Bill an article which explains the high cost of housing is caused for the reasons I stated. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.1913739 http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

grahamburger 10y ago

Oh hey, I've been to that shelter. I live in (and grew up in) Utah. My Aunt is severely mentally ill and homeless and relies on the Road Home shelter, I've visited her there a few times. They are doing good work, although being homeless is still pretty shitty, obviously. The hardest part is that the state could take much better care of her if she would allow herself to be diagnosed as handicapped due to her mental illness, but she doesn't believe that she's mentally ill. And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive. I don't really know where she's at now, we only have fleeting contact with her. EDIT: A sad/curious anecdote - at one time she was placed in an apartment. I don't know the details but it was probably using the programs outlined in the article. She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. As I understand she believed that she owned the apartment complex and could not understand why the managers would not let her make decisions, so she lit it on fire.

humanrebar 10y ago
> And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive. Counter-productive is an empirical question, but why is forcing treatment always unethical? > ...She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. ...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible? Often people on the street are at least committing fraud (lying for food, bus fare, cash, etc.). I understand that people do what they need to for survival (at least on their terms), but there is an actual cost to that. For instance, if someone actually lost their wallet and needed fare home, they have to compete with people who say they haven't eaten in days but actually don't want professional help (and may even be unfit to make that decision in the first place). The information asymmetry is enormous in this sort of interaction. To reiterate, the people getting conned aren't the biggest victims here; it's the people who have to deal with a jaded audience and fraudulent sob stories when $20, bus fare, or a prepaid phone is legitimately their biggest need. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to counterpoints about this, but it just doesn't make sense to me that the government isn't responsible for people who can't (or won't) take care of themselves. I'm talking haven't showered in weeks; open sores on their feet, faces, and bodies; etc. Literally no other group has (or should have!) the power to require someone to get care. If we say it's not the government's job, we're saying it's nobody's job. I'm willing to hear other thoughts on this. My current conclusion is that the status quo is ethically unconscionable but politically impossible to do anything about, but maybe I'm missing something.

wichsen 10y ago

During my 10 year stint living in Utah, I frequently read about homeless people being found frozen to death in parks during the winter. A really sad reality for out-of-luck folks in freezing regions.

ben_jones 10y ago

Is there any kind of communication network for homeless, homeless advocates, homeless volunteers, etc. to communicate various local initiatives that have proven productive in improving the lives of homeless people?

yalogin 10y ago

Nevada is probably putting their homeless on a bus and sending them to Utah. Not being funny here, they got caught doing that in the past.

equity 10y ago

The following blog argues that there is sloppy accounting in the claimed 90+% reduction of homelessness. "Although overall homelessness has actually increased slightly over the past decade in Utah, such a large reduction in chronic homelessness is still an impressive achievement. But is it real? Unfortunately, no. I spent some time studying Utah’s data and found that the miraculous 91 percent reduction in chronic homelessness appears to be driven by changes in how people were counted, rather than by how many there were." http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9380860 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9380860