5 ms·

Helping the homeless in San Francisco

46 points by gitdude 10y ago

adityabansod 10y ago
I was at the meetup they held a few weeks ago at Atlassian; probably the most interesting bit to me (as a 10+ year SF resident) was Jeff Kositsky discussion about some of the structural work the city was doing to address the issues -- namely reorganizing three different groups into one, streamlining data collection and reporting, and trying to get services more accessible.
don_draper 10y ago
Don't forget to estimate and log your work
- ilostmykeys 10y ago
  haha! the tools they build are meant for Vogons, not coders. In fact, Jira takes the "agile" out of agile.
dfabulich 10y ago
> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do. Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology. Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data. If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!") Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it. Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard. A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?" Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!
- mjevans 10y ago
  The only thing you are wrong about is the how fungible and fluid the issue is. This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level. I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.
- cfishswim 10y ago
  (Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area. My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.
- cauterized 10y ago
  Probably not to solve it, but maybe to improve on it. Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient? How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives? Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people? Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?
  - mjevans 10y ago
erentz 10y ago
I feel like the best thing Bay Area tech companies could do to help with homelessness is to use their influence to fix zoning and transit. Granted this is short of them getting involved in campaigning for things like universal health care, better mental health facilities, drug decriminaiation, and other such issues that are harder to touch. But the impact of lowering overall housing costs would help many. And the reduced housing costs would reduce the demand for stupidly high tech wages helping with the inequality in the Bay Area. CEOs of these tech companies must live in bubbles to not see the threat that Bay Area housing costs have to their business.
armen52 10y ago
Since when did we start referring to ourselves as "the tech elite"? This seems like the wrong way to frame the problem, or our relation to it.
Mz 10y ago
I desperately wish we would stop trying so hard to "help The Homeless" and start trying to make housing more affordable and neighborhoods more walkable so that ordinary people with ordinary jobs can walk to work and rent or buy housing that fits their budget. Then we don't have to have these bleeding heart bullshit displays of how fucking much people care when people mostly do not care and, instead, they just like having an excuse to massage their own ego and tell you how morally superior they are. Stop treating poor people like pets you rescued and can now show off as proof of how compassionate you are. Just build a world that WORKS, for all people, not just the rich. We need to build a world where people who are not "the tech elite" can afford to live in it without some kind of intervention program. Geez. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-decent-housing-not-minimum-wage.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...
bxb1552 10y ago
It's hard to believe that the problem is a lack of funds when the city's 2015-16 budget allocates $241m to help ~7k homeless people. It sounds more like we can't figure out how to deploy these resources effectively.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Jeez, $35k/yr/person and they're still homeless? If this were happening in my country, I'd be certain most of the money is lining someone's pockets.
- imh 10y ago
  That sounds like a ton, but for the estimated 7k-10k homeless people in SF, that's $24k-34k per person annually. A lot of money, but not an insane amount given the high local costs of absolutely everything.
  - aseipp 10y ago
    Also: is the $241mil estimate the actual literal amount reserved/given to the homeless of SF -- or is it the budget for the entire project of dealing with homelessness in SF? I see this number get thrown around and I don't think I've ever seen anyone clarify this bit? It seems quite obvious and very significant to factor in operation costs if this is the case. If things like the budget for those shelters and their employees also come out of the $241mil -- even assuming an even split -- you're probably looking at way less than $30k or even $20k per-person already... Assuming it 'only' cost $50 million to run it all, that's about $19k per person at 10,000 homeless, with 25k-at-7k.
jxramos 10y ago
That ECS stuff makes me think about that old Heather MacDonald article about The sidewalks of San Francisco and all various interest groups and cynical factions she unveils in her article which she refers to as "Homelessness, Inc". It's forever changed my skepticism around this topic. http://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-13321.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-133...
- cvwright 10y ago
  Reminds me of Willamette Week's recent story about Portland's failure to build enough affordable housing. The reported reason? The city funds "cool" projects run by "cool" nonprofits instead of spending money where it will do the most good. Super frustrating but also informative. http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build-thousands-of-affordable-apartments-heres-why-it-keeps-coming-up-short/ http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build...
  - jxramos 10y ago
    Pretty good quotes from various involved individuals, such as "Our government is so caught up in efforts to appease so many interests that they step right over that guy on the sidewalk to accomplish other goals,"
SmokyBorbon 10y ago
> how on earth is it possible that the most technologically advanced city in the country, maybe the world, can allow this type of poverty, sickness, drug abuse, and helplessness exist on its doorsteps? should be > how on earth is it possible that San Francisco is allowed to cause this type of poverty, sickness, drug abuse, and helplessness? Do-gooders like this author are the source of the suffering. We shouldn't expect them to come up with the cure. In my city they providing meals to the homeless without a professional food preparation license. I'm sure the idiots intended to improve the quality of food the homeless receive. Instead it just starved them. I'm sure next year they'll come up with another idiotic solution to the starvation problem. But they'll never admit they caused it.
the_economist 10y ago
Homelessness is mainly a byproduct of mental illness and drug addiction. If you want to solve homelessness, you need to target those problems. I would suggest that new technology is needed, particularly in the case of mental illness. We do not have a good medicine to treat schizophrenia, for example. The city of San Francisco spends $241 million/year on ~7 thousand homeless, an indication that throwing money at this problem doesn't do much.
- davidjnelson 10y ago
  Any idea why there is no effective medicine for it? It seems like a really important thing to solve. It sounds like a _lot_ of people would benefit.
  - the_economist 10y ago
    Human biology is hard. We don't have a cure for AIDS, baldness, acne, heart disease, cancer, the common cold, etc.
    - xg15 10y ago
      Also note that "schizophrenia" is not an illness but a family of illnesses (and even that definition is one of the less fuzzy ones). Finding a "universal cure" is as likely as finding a universal cure for cancer. That is, very unlikely.
      - davidjnelson 10y ago
        Oh wow I didn't know that. I thought it was a neurotransmitter issue with unbalanced levels of various neurotransmitter and/or receptors, but I don't know much about it. Science will get there someday though! I guess for both cancer and complex mental illness and other types of complex illness, the trick would be to both find a workable solution to each sub-problem, and then use them to address the full complex. It would be cool if companies were working on these types of approaches. I wonder if any are?
    - 10y ago
xg15 10y ago
Non-SF resident here. From other stories I have read, it seems to me as if housing prices start to reach levels where even average middle-class workers have trouble finding something affordable. If this is true, can a program like CHEFS actually get someone out of homelessness?

46 points by gitdude 10y ago

I was at the meetup they held a few weeks ago at Atlassian; probably the most interesting bit to me (as a 10+ year SF resident) was Jeff Kositsky discussion about some of the structural work the city was doing to address the issues -- namely reorganizing three different groups into one, streamlining data collection and reporting, and trying to get services more accessible.

don_draper 10y ago

Don't forget to estimate and log your work

ilostmykeys 10y ago
haha! the tools they build are meant for Vogons, not coders. In fact, Jira takes the "agile" out of agile.

dfabulich 10y ago

> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do. Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology. Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data. If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!") Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it. Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard. A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?" Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!

mjevans 10y ago
The only thing you are wrong about is the how fungible and fluid the issue is. This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level. I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.
cfishswim 10y ago
(Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area. My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.
cauterized 10y ago
Probably not to solve it, but maybe to improve on it. Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient? How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives? Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people? Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?
- mjevans 10y ago

erentz 10y ago

I feel like the best thing Bay Area tech companies could do to help with homelessness is to use their influence to fix zoning and transit. Granted this is short of them getting involved in campaigning for things like universal health care, better mental health facilities, drug decriminaiation, and other such issues that are harder to touch. But the impact of lowering overall housing costs would help many. And the reduced housing costs would reduce the demand for stupidly high tech wages helping with the inequality in the Bay Area. CEOs of these tech companies must live in bubbles to not see the threat that Bay Area housing costs have to their business.

armen52 10y ago

Since when did we start referring to ourselves as "the tech elite"? This seems like the wrong way to frame the problem, or our relation to it.

Mz 10y ago

I desperately wish we would stop trying so hard to "help The Homeless" and start trying to make housing more affordable and neighborhoods more walkable so that ordinary people with ordinary jobs can walk to work and rent or buy housing that fits their budget. Then we don't have to have these bleeding heart bullshit displays of how fucking much people care when people mostly do not care and, instead, they just like having an excuse to massage their own ego and tell you how morally superior they are. Stop treating poor people like pets you rescued and can now show off as proof of how compassionate you are. Just build a world that WORKS, for all people, not just the rich. We need to build a world where people who are not "the tech elite" can afford to live in it without some kind of intervention program. Geez. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-decent-housing-not-minimum-wage.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...

bxb1552 10y ago

It's hard to believe that the problem is a lack of funds when the city's 2015-16 budget allocates $241m to help ~7k homeless people. It sounds more like we can't figure out how to deploy these resources effectively.

StavrosK 10y ago
Jeez, $35k/yr/person and they're still homeless? If this were happening in my country, I'd be certain most of the money is lining someone's pockets.
imh 10y ago
That sounds like a ton, but for the estimated 7k-10k homeless people in SF, that's $24k-34k per person annually. A lot of money, but not an insane amount given the high local costs of absolutely everything.
- aseipp 10y ago
  Also: is the $241mil estimate the actual literal amount reserved/given to the homeless of SF -- or is it the budget for the entire project of dealing with homelessness in SF? I see this number get thrown around and I don't think I've ever seen anyone clarify this bit? It seems quite obvious and very significant to factor in operation costs if this is the case. If things like the budget for those shelters and their employees also come out of the $241mil -- even assuming an even split -- you're probably looking at way less than $30k or even $20k per-person already... Assuming it 'only' cost $50 million to run it all, that's about $19k per person at 10,000 homeless, with 25k-at-7k.

jxramos 10y ago

That ECS stuff makes me think about that old Heather MacDonald article about The sidewalks of San Francisco and all various interest groups and cynical factions she unveils in her article which she refers to as "Homelessness, Inc". It's forever changed my skepticism around this topic. http://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-13321.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-133...

cvwright 10y ago
Reminds me of Willamette Week's recent story about Portland's failure to build enough affordable housing. The reported reason? The city funds "cool" projects run by "cool" nonprofits instead of spending money where it will do the most good. Super frustrating but also informative. http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build-thousands-of-affordable-apartments-heres-why-it-keeps-coming-up-short/ http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build...
- jxramos 10y ago
  Pretty good quotes from various involved individuals, such as "Our government is so caught up in efforts to appease so many interests that they step right over that guy on the sidewalk to accomplish other goals,"

SmokyBorbon 10y ago

> how on earth is it possible that the most technologically advanced city in the country, maybe the world, can allow this type of poverty, sickness, drug abuse, and helplessness exist on its doorsteps? should be > how on earth is it possible that San Francisco is allowed to cause this type of poverty, sickness, drug abuse, and helplessness? Do-gooders like this author are the source of the suffering. We shouldn't expect them to come up with the cure. In my city they providing meals to the homeless without a professional food preparation license. I'm sure the idiots intended to improve the quality of food the homeless receive. Instead it just starved them. I'm sure next year they'll come up with another idiotic solution to the starvation problem. But they'll never admit they caused it.

the_economist 10y ago

Homelessness is mainly a byproduct of mental illness and drug addiction. If you want to solve homelessness, you need to target those problems. I would suggest that new technology is needed, particularly in the case of mental illness. We do not have a good medicine to treat schizophrenia, for example. The city of San Francisco spends $241 million/year on ~7 thousand homeless, an indication that throwing money at this problem doesn't do much.

davidjnelson 10y ago
Any idea why there is no effective medicine for it? It seems like a really important thing to solve. It sounds like a _lot_ of people would benefit.
- the_economist 10y ago
  Human biology is hard. We don't have a cure for AIDS, baldness, acne, heart disease, cancer, the common cold, etc.
  - xg15 10y ago
    Also note that "schizophrenia" is not an illness but a family of illnesses (and even that definition is one of the less fuzzy ones). Finding a "universal cure" is as likely as finding a universal cure for cancer. That is, very unlikely.
    - davidjnelson 10y ago
      Oh wow I didn't know that. I thought it was a neurotransmitter issue with unbalanced levels of various neurotransmitter and/or receptors, but I don't know much about it. Science will get there someday though! I guess for both cancer and complex mental illness and other types of complex illness, the trick would be to both find a workable solution to each sub-problem, and then use them to address the full complex. It would be cool if companies were working on these types of approaches. I wonder if any are?
  - 10y ago

xg15 10y ago

Non-SF resident here. From other stories I have read, it seems to me as if housing prices start to reach levels where even average middle-class workers have trouble finding something affordable. If this is true, can a program like CHEFS actually get someone out of homelessness?