16 ms·

How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

328 points by teslacar 10y ago

John23832 10y ago
Imo housing first has always been the best option. Think about how hamstrung people feel trying to conduct their lives out of hotels... now imaging being homeless.
tabeth 10y ago
I wonder if better/more accessible health care would eliminate homeless as a side effect. It seems much of the homeless in Boston, anyway is mental health/health related. I doubt anyone will say that what Utah did here is bad, but you have to wonder what's preventing a more comprehensive solution (the answer is politics, but ideally you'd get a more specific answer).
- ebiester 10y ago
  Some yes, some no. Let's remember that mental health care is not as easy as a magic pill. It can take months to stabilize someone. Someone with schizophrenia may have difficulty staying on a regimen. (The side effects are bad in many cases, and the drugs aren't a magic cure.) Some people would do best in a psychiatric ward more permanently, for example, but that's including housing. Bipolar treatment can stop working and it can take months to get things readjusted. Inversely, homelessness exacerbates mental illness in many ways, and stabilizing the housing situation goes a long way toward stabilizing the mental illness.
  - tabeth 10y ago
    I agree with you, but (most) people don't start off homeless in life, so what factor(s) make people homeless? I bet one of the top ones are health reasons.
    - ebiester 10y ago
      Luckily, we don't have to speculate. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html
- jrowley 10y ago
  The line between safe housing and healthcare really starts to blur when you start talking about people with severe mental health issues. Another side is that debt from expensive medical care can result in homelessness. It all should be considered basic welfare that we should be providing instead of gutting.
- xraystyle 10y ago
  It seems to me that largely the issue is there's no mechanism to force people into treatment for drug/alcohol addiction and mental illness. Here in Los Angeles the number of homeless who are severely mentally ill is incredibly high. It's quite common to see homeless people standing on street corners, yelling and screaming at non-existent antagonists, behaving bizarrely, urinating and defecating in broad daylight, and creating a general nuisance for everyone around them. The same goes for seeing drug and alcohol use in public, especially in places like downtown LA and Venice Beach. Seems to me that the homelessness isn't the problem, so much as a symptom of the underlying issues of addiction and mental illness, and unless people voluntarily seek treatment for those issues their situation is unlikely to change. Whether the healthcare is available or not, the question is moot if you can't force people to go to rehab and take their meds.
  - NewCathargo 10y ago
    Rehab is worthless beyond worthless. I liked Audrey Murphy's strategy, of locking himself in a room for a week, far better. Rehab doesn't address the part where you come back to normal life. And all the old aches and pains start up and nothing seems worthwhile and there's little work... Teaching the homeless to be COMPETENT nomads is a better strategy. Otherwise they're at the mercy of public officials and contractors who only see them as a flesh to money machine.
  - vondur 10y ago
    You care completely correct about the obvious need for mental health and addiction care. I'm guessing 90% of the people living on the street are drug addicts and have mental illnesses. It's a hard problem to deal with as just giving someone housing that has these kinds of issues won't fix the underlying problems and they'll end back up on the streets. In California, due to a court order and some newly enacted laws via propositions, a lot of people have been released from jails, which I'm guessing is where many of the mentally ill/drug addicts previously ended up.
  - slv77 10y ago
    In the US the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that unless an individual was a threat to themselves or others they couldn't be institutionalized. This was one step of a much bigger reform of care for those that are disabled or mentally ill called deinstitutionalization. In the past those with mental illness or disability were locked up in facilities with little support for reintegration into society. In many cases being committed was effectively a life sentence. There were also cases of abuse of the system where people were committed for rebelling against parents, homosexuality or political dissidence. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to transition patients to community based care but it was never funded to the level that would have been needed to support the transition. Even in the US today mental health care is typically the bastard child of the US health care system with minimal coverage. A $50,000 dollar a year arthritis medication is covered but only a couple of days to stabilize a patient in a mental health crisis. I'm not sure if community based care would have ever worked even with the right funding and that a lot of the addiction and mental health issues may be related to the lack of environments that support mental health. I'm pretty sure that the alternative from earlier in the century also isn't the right approach.
tfo 10y ago
[2015]
snowpanda 10y ago
> Utah says it won 'war on homelessness', but shelters tell a different story https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  And they're now building a new shelter: http://www.sltrib.com/home/4979717-155/live-state-leaders-discuss-progress-of http://www.sltrib.com/home/4979717-155/live-state-leaders-di...
wyldfire 10y ago
> For Joe Ortega, it means ... getting used to being alone. I would not have figured that moving off the street would be more isolating than living on the street. Don't these housing options mean that someone else is living just in an adjacent room or across the hall?
- st3v3r 10y ago
  When you're used to them laying right next to you, with no walls between, then adding walls is going to be more isolating.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    And more insulating, dryer and safer. Couldn't a dwelling, room or bed be shared if loneliness was a problem?
austenallred 10y ago
I'm confused by this. My brother has an office in downtown SLC near the Rio Grande building, and it's pretty clear when I visit him that there are hundreds of homeless people living in that neighborhood alone. Pioneer Park is also covered in homeless people. If that is less than 200 people either I don't understand what "homeless" means or something is... off. How does one define "chronic homelessness?" I really want it to be true. I have seen first hand how hard so many people work to help the homeless; through nonprofits, the government, and the LDS Church. But declaring "victory" over homelessness rings pretty hollow if you walk the streets of Salt Lake City.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  One thing that sticks in my mind after a business trip to SLC (SaltConf last year) were the ubiquitous red signs urging people to turn away panhandlers. If people actually take notice, I'd be willing to bet this results in the problem being hidden a lot more than it is in some other cities. The admittedly surface impression I got was that the city is hostile to the homeless.
  - douche 10y ago
    I was very disappointed that ordinances to restrict panhandling in medians were overturned in Portland, ME in recent years. There's no need of that. If you are willing to work, there is always work to be done for a decent wage, (although possibly less than the absurd level minimum wage has climbed to).
    - bitJericho 10y ago
      The minimum wage nowadays is just outrageous. http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-1938/ http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Anyone who claims the minimum wage level is absurd has clearly never tried to live on it.
suresk 10y ago
It was interesting to hear about this, then drive down Rio Grande street or around Pioneer Park and see the massive tent cities and tons of homeless people. Things got really bad downtown the last year or so. I wonder if this is a case of Salt Lake doing such a good job that homeless from other states were attracted here?
- reflexorozy 10y ago
  This survey says... maybe. http://www.sltrib.com/home/5030908-155/rio-grande-homeless-assessment-half-from http://www.sltrib.com/home/5030908-155/rio-grande-homeless-a...
- richmarr 10y ago
  They're focused on the chronic homeless, so there's still a problem even before proposing migration caused by this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tflinton 10y ago
  Naw, I live right next to there it was worse five years ago but now it's fairly clean. 90% of people 'homeless' are panhandlers but they're not in dire circumstances and have homes.
saosebastiao 10y ago
I have no doubt that this program works, even if the success has been overstated [0]. What we really need to think critically about is how exportable the concept is. And really, it comes down to one singular reason, housing costs[1]. High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness, which means that higher housing costs increase the total number of homeless people and the duration of homelessness. They also increase the capital and administration costs of administering the program, often by a factor of two or more. So in a city like Seattle or San Francisco, you're going to have drastically more people to house, for drastically longer periods of time, and at higher fixed and variable costs. I have no problem believing that this solution if exported to San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, would cost anywhere between 1-2 orders of magnitude more than SLC as a percentage of total population. IMO, anti-housing-development trends in our most economically important cities truly have become the US' largest source of injustice in the 21st century [2]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles... [1] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-rent-trends https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-re... [2] https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.vr3asyt59 https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...
- tomcam 10y ago
  >High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness Citation needed. Because another reason the homeless migrate to these places is that they spend massive sums on homeless outreach, which draws people in from other areas. I don't know what percentage of homelessness is due to either cause, but I don't see that you do either (not trying to be mean).
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    It was a logically deductive assertion, although I'm sure there are studies out there. Homelessness is defined as not having a home, and all else equal, a relatively higher cost of having a home will result in relatively more people not having a home. The extent that other city-specific factors contribute to the problem may change absolute numbers in either direction, but relative homelessness should always be higher given higher housing costs.
meritt 10y ago
Utah didn't solve homelessness. The primary "reduction" was changing the definition of chronic homelessness and now less people are being counted. http://www.aei.org/publication/on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-in-chronic-homelessness/ http://www.aei.org/publication/on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-...
- ProAm 10y ago
  So its like the US unemployment rate?
  - organsnyder 10y ago
    When was the US unemployment rate definition changed? I know there are debates around whether the rate we normally talk about is the most important indicator, but the definition has remained the same for decades, AFAIK.
    - ProAm 10y ago
      Correct I see how I didn't explain well the point I was trying to make. Its always been the same, but it's a tad shady on what they actually count as unemployed. For instance they do not count discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers, or people who stopped looking because they simply cannot find work. The unemployment percent in the US is largely a political talking point/fodder wherein the government doesn't do much to change it.
      - organsnyder 10y ago
        As long as you're tracking the same metric over time, it's still useful. I haven't studied the data to back this up, but I suspect that it and other unemployment metrics will tend to follow parallel trajectories over time. That's not to say that we can ignore the other metrics—they obviously provide useful information—but it still provides a good year-over-year comparison. I see two scenarios that could be "shady": 1. The metric calculation is drastically changed (hasn't happened, to my knowledge) 2. The government somehow manages to "tweak" the economy in a way that artificially alters this metric (unlikely) Regarding unemployment percent: The government doesn't have a lot of direct control over this (though federal spending does provide tons of jobs, obviously), but policy certainly can cause major implications. Health care, banking, and environmental regulations (to name a few) can cause massive shifts in employment. Come to think of it, I can see a scenario where federal policy could keep the unemployment rate lower relative to other metrics: The Affordable Care Act made it easier for people to get coverage outside of employment. Perhaps this allowed some people to settle for less-than-full-time positions, or to remain unemployed for longer than they would have (perhaps to care for family, or to pursue an entrepreneurial dream, or education...). This could cause the traditional unemployment rate to remain artificially low, compared to before the ACA was implemented. No idea if this is actually true, and one could debate whether it's a good outcome or not, but it's an interesting possibility.
cpncrunch 10y ago
>A similar approach was first tried in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and New York City in the early 1990s. Does anyone have a reference for this? I did some searching, but didn't find anything. If anything, the articles I found just said that homelessness in LA was a continuing problem throughout the 80s until today.
mabbo 10y ago
The 'Housing First' model was really pushed hard by Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea. But he, like Lloyd Pendleton in this article, apparently figured out that it saves a lot of money, ideology be damned. Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals: prove that it will save money and let them lower taxes.
- douche 10y ago
  Would that it would be possible for the reverse to happen. Never will left-wing politicians lower tax rates.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jtedward 10y ago
    Obama lowered taxes, in fact no Democratic president has raised taxes during my lifetime (I'm 25). It's pretty strange people always claim this is a thing when it's just flat false.
    - refurb 10y ago
      That's only true if you ignore the ACA taxes.[1] [1]http://www.atr.org/full-list-ACA-tax-hikes-a6996 http://www.atr.org/full-list-ACA-tax-hikes-a6996
    - madenine 10y ago
      probably expecting a lot from username "douche"
      - douche 10y ago
        That's the best you can come up with? Go home and start over
hl5 10y ago
Homes for the homeless. What an obvious solution! May I suggest medical care for the sick next? I'm glad some cities are starting to recognize the level of dignity and hope a private residence with private facilities can give to impoverished families. Sadly it appears these types of programs seem to only be funded when wrapped in some questionable marketing or political gain.
- itstriz 10y ago
  Food for the hungry would be a good one too.
vondur 10y ago
Last time I was in Salt Lake, there were a bunch of homeless people camped out all over the place. It was really odd, I noticed some of them were just casually smoking weed. Still not as bad as it is here in the Southern California area.
perseusprime11 10y ago
I wish there is something we can do in New York City. In the last two years, I saw a significant increase in the number of homeless people in New York City. They have no home and take refuge in subways and the bathrooms at Penn Station.
thebosz 10y ago
Regardless of how effective or how it's just "changing the definition" at least it is helping. Unlike here in Portland where it's just ignored and occasionally the tent cities get pushed to a different area.
hackermailman 10y ago
Vancouver tried the same thing. The made a policy of eradicating homelessness by X date and the city bought up SROs to put them in and other housing options. The problem is once the rest of Canada's homeless heard about this they came in droves, often given one way bus tickets by police, so it's impossible to solve chronic homelessness without some kind of national effort. Utah this strategy works because there isn't a flood of people going there like they are San Francisco or LA's Skid Row. It would be great if governments could have some kind of yearly conference to compare data and strategies to figure out what works/doesn't work at scale.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Homelessness is a serious problem in Vancouver. Just walking along granville st., aka "entertainment district" (hard to NOT be snarky here too many awful memories) there's vagabond population along the sidewalk in front of luxury shops. They commit crimes because they are mentally ill and take drugs. They aggressively pan handle even while leeching off our generous social programs while the middle class can't even find proper homes. Worse, people support the population by pretending to be generous but in reality self serving their own ego to be perceived as a "nice & empathetic human". Pan handlers know this very well and exploit it. Even getting pissy and whiny when you refuse to give change. It's like they feel entitled to free money and too strung out to even put an effort in it. I've given money to street performers and people hustling. These homeless population in Vancouver are mostly drug addicts and broken humans who are unable to help themselves. They will buy drugs with the money you give them with high certainty. It's seriously putting inconvenience to the rest of the city and you are absolutely right that the rest of Canada's homeless population are given a one way greyhound ticket to Vancouver. I refuse to pay taxes towards people who have no desire to change their situation and instead feel entitled and constantly leeching off the backs of hard working folks who are also struggling. When the housing market collapses in Vancouver, the city is going to have a tough time forcefully relocating the homeless population.
- 3JPLW 10y ago
  That's precisely what NACo — the National Association of (US) Counties — does. They have initiatives on both data driven justice[1] and housing[2]. 1. http://www.naco.org/resources/programs-and-services/data-driven-justice http://www.naco.org/resources/programs-and-services/data-dri... 2. http://www.naco.org/news/roof-of-their-own http://www.naco.org/news/roof-of-their-own
NewCathargo 10y ago
Give every homeless person a $20 thing of nicotine each month. Stop the ponzi scheme of housing costs. Teach them skills general enough to plug into a variety of jobs and specific enough to survive alongside automation. Giving a chronically homeless person a "home" doesn't make up for the completely shattered social network they have. And the shattered sense of civil conduct in a society which literally tossed them to the trash. My melancholy tells me the above will never happen. Homelessness is a shadow industry where nobody gets punished for letting relapses happen. Therefore, nobody "owns" performance in getting the homeless into a housed state. In the industry, talking points are more valuable than actual "performance".
brilliantcode 10y ago
So you redefined homelessness and end up counting less people in order to call it success.
Overtonwindow 10y ago
*From December 2015
rpmcmurphy 10y ago
Imagine what the states could do with the > $50 billion we are about to send to our already outsized military.
tn13 10y ago
Homelessness should not be a problem in USA where land is plenty. If homelessness is a problem it is mostly because cities are not growing horizontally fast enough.
randyrand 10y ago
As an aside, this is a perfect illustration of the states-rights approach going well. States are testing incubators for trying new ideas.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Amen, brother
- therealdrag0 10y ago
  For sure, but with state boarders so easy to cross, it can be messy to compare. Homeless, guns, etc, can all migrate.
eip 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o
m-j-fox 10y ago
Better yet, 100 miles west of San Francisco
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't comment like this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897306 and marked it off-topic.
ninju 10y ago
This an older article...and I think it might have been on HN already
Mz 10y ago
Maybe "enlightened self interest" as a governing principle will catch on.
tomcam 10y ago
This will sound hostile. It is not meant to. Didn't we do the "housing first" thing decades ago? The Projects in the Bronx? Cabrini Green in Chicago? Now most of those places are torn down or being gentrified or are miserable black holes of chaos and crime. It seems to me that it's really important that residents have some skin in the game, which may be the difference in the Utah program. It is also notable that the Mormon church has such deep involvement. Here in Seattle the Union Gospel Mission has been infinitely at dealing with homeless than the bureaucracy.
Unbeliever69 10y ago
The situation in Utah is FAR from perfect. I work near a building that was renovated to house the homeless. These places are often rampant with prostitution, drug dealing and other nefarious operations. In effect many now have a roof over their heads, but they now live in what some might consider slums.
- ythn 10y ago
  What would you have done differently had you been in charge?
tracker1 10y ago
Definitely better than when they were just buying bus tickets for the homeless to go to Phoenix and Albuquerque... (Fixing the homeless problem by making it someone else's problem)

328 points by teslacar 10y ago

Imo housing first has always been the best option. Think about how hamstrung people feel trying to conduct their lives out of hotels... now imaging being homeless.

tabeth 10y ago

I wonder if better/more accessible health care would eliminate homeless as a side effect. It seems much of the homeless in Boston, anyway is mental health/health related. I doubt anyone will say that what Utah did here is bad, but you have to wonder what's preventing a more comprehensive solution (the answer is politics, but ideally you'd get a more specific answer).

ebiester 10y ago
Some yes, some no. Let's remember that mental health care is not as easy as a magic pill. It can take months to stabilize someone. Someone with schizophrenia may have difficulty staying on a regimen. (The side effects are bad in many cases, and the drugs aren't a magic cure.) Some people would do best in a psychiatric ward more permanently, for example, but that's including housing. Bipolar treatment can stop working and it can take months to get things readjusted. Inversely, homelessness exacerbates mental illness in many ways, and stabilizing the housing situation goes a long way toward stabilizing the mental illness.
- tabeth 10y ago
  I agree with you, but (most) people don't start off homeless in life, so what factor(s) make people homeless? I bet one of the top ones are health reasons.
  - ebiester 10y ago
    Luckily, we don't have to speculate. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html
jrowley 10y ago
The line between safe housing and healthcare really starts to blur when you start talking about people with severe mental health issues. Another side is that debt from expensive medical care can result in homelessness. It all should be considered basic welfare that we should be providing instead of gutting.
xraystyle 10y ago
It seems to me that largely the issue is there's no mechanism to force people into treatment for drug/alcohol addiction and mental illness. Here in Los Angeles the number of homeless who are severely mentally ill is incredibly high. It's quite common to see homeless people standing on street corners, yelling and screaming at non-existent antagonists, behaving bizarrely, urinating and defecating in broad daylight, and creating a general nuisance for everyone around them. The same goes for seeing drug and alcohol use in public, especially in places like downtown LA and Venice Beach. Seems to me that the homelessness isn't the problem, so much as a symptom of the underlying issues of addiction and mental illness, and unless people voluntarily seek treatment for those issues their situation is unlikely to change. Whether the healthcare is available or not, the question is moot if you can't force people to go to rehab and take their meds.
- NewCathargo 10y ago
  Rehab is worthless beyond worthless. I liked Audrey Murphy's strategy, of locking himself in a room for a week, far better. Rehab doesn't address the part where you come back to normal life. And all the old aches and pains start up and nothing seems worthwhile and there's little work... Teaching the homeless to be COMPETENT nomads is a better strategy. Otherwise they're at the mercy of public officials and contractors who only see them as a flesh to money machine.
- vondur 10y ago
  You care completely correct about the obvious need for mental health and addiction care. I'm guessing 90% of the people living on the street are drug addicts and have mental illnesses. It's a hard problem to deal with as just giving someone housing that has these kinds of issues won't fix the underlying problems and they'll end back up on the streets. In California, due to a court order and some newly enacted laws via propositions, a lot of people have been released from jails, which I'm guessing is where many of the mentally ill/drug addicts previously ended up.
- slv77 10y ago
  In the US the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that unless an individual was a threat to themselves or others they couldn't be institutionalized. This was one step of a much bigger reform of care for those that are disabled or mentally ill called deinstitutionalization. In the past those with mental illness or disability were locked up in facilities with little support for reintegration into society. In many cases being committed was effectively a life sentence. There were also cases of abuse of the system where people were committed for rebelling against parents, homosexuality or political dissidence. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to transition patients to community based care but it was never funded to the level that would have been needed to support the transition. Even in the US today mental health care is typically the bastard child of the US health care system with minimal coverage. A $50,000 dollar a year arthritis medication is covered but only a couple of days to stabilize a patient in a mental health crisis. I'm not sure if community based care would have ever worked even with the right funding and that a lot of the addiction and mental health issues may be related to the lack of environments that support mental health. I'm pretty sure that the alternative from earlier in the century also isn't the right approach.

tfo 10y ago

[2015]

snowpanda 10y ago

> Utah says it won 'war on homelessness', but shelters tell a different story https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...

cpncrunch 10y ago
And they're now building a new shelter: http://www.sltrib.com/home/4979717-155/live-state-leaders-discuss-progress-of http://www.sltrib.com/home/4979717-155/live-state-leaders-di...

wyldfire 10y ago

> For Joe Ortega, it means ... getting used to being alone. I would not have figured that moving off the street would be more isolating than living on the street. Don't these housing options mean that someone else is living just in an adjacent room or across the hall?

st3v3r 10y ago
When you're used to them laying right next to you, with no walls between, then adding walls is going to be more isolating.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  And more insulating, dryer and safer. Couldn't a dwelling, room or bed be shared if loneliness was a problem?

austenallred 10y ago

I'm confused by this. My brother has an office in downtown SLC near the Rio Grande building, and it's pretty clear when I visit him that there are hundreds of homeless people living in that neighborhood alone. Pioneer Park is also covered in homeless people. If that is less than 200 people either I don't understand what "homeless" means or something is... off. How does one define "chronic homelessness?" I really want it to be true. I have seen first hand how hard so many people work to help the homeless; through nonprofits, the government, and the LDS Church. But declaring "victory" over homelessness rings pretty hollow if you walk the streets of Salt Lake City.

Karunamon 10y ago
One thing that sticks in my mind after a business trip to SLC (SaltConf last year) were the ubiquitous red signs urging people to turn away panhandlers. If people actually take notice, I'd be willing to bet this results in the problem being hidden a lot more than it is in some other cities. The admittedly surface impression I got was that the city is hostile to the homeless.
- douche 10y ago
  I was very disappointed that ordinances to restrict panhandling in medians were overturned in Portland, ME in recent years. There's no need of that. If you are willing to work, there is always work to be done for a decent wage, (although possibly less than the absurd level minimum wage has climbed to).
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    The minimum wage nowadays is just outrageous. http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-1938/ http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Anyone who claims the minimum wage level is absurd has clearly never tried to live on it.

suresk 10y ago

It was interesting to hear about this, then drive down Rio Grande street or around Pioneer Park and see the massive tent cities and tons of homeless people. Things got really bad downtown the last year or so. I wonder if this is a case of Salt Lake doing such a good job that homeless from other states were attracted here?

reflexorozy 10y ago
This survey says... maybe. http://www.sltrib.com/home/5030908-155/rio-grande-homeless-assessment-half-from http://www.sltrib.com/home/5030908-155/rio-grande-homeless-a...
richmarr 10y ago
They're focused on the chronic homeless, so there's still a problem even before proposing migration caused by this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tflinton 10y ago
Naw, I live right next to there it was worse five years ago but now it's fairly clean. 90% of people 'homeless' are panhandlers but they're not in dire circumstances and have homes.

saosebastiao 10y ago

I have no doubt that this program works, even if the success has been overstated [0]. What we really need to think critically about is how exportable the concept is. And really, it comes down to one singular reason, housing costs[1]. High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness, which means that higher housing costs increase the total number of homeless people and the duration of homelessness. They also increase the capital and administration costs of administering the program, often by a factor of two or more. So in a city like Seattle or San Francisco, you're going to have drastically more people to house, for drastically longer periods of time, and at higher fixed and variable costs. I have no problem believing that this solution if exported to San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, would cost anywhere between 1-2 orders of magnitude more than SLC as a percentage of total population. IMO, anti-housing-development trends in our most economically important cities truly have become the US' largest source of injustice in the 21st century [2]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles... [1] https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-rent-trends https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-re... [2] https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.vr3asyt59 https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...

tomcam 10y ago
>High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness Citation needed. Because another reason the homeless migrate to these places is that they spend massive sums on homeless outreach, which draws people in from other areas. I don't know what percentage of homelessness is due to either cause, but I don't see that you do either (not trying to be mean).
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  It was a logically deductive assertion, although I'm sure there are studies out there. Homelessness is defined as not having a home, and all else equal, a relatively higher cost of having a home will result in relatively more people not having a home. The extent that other city-specific factors contribute to the problem may change absolute numbers in either direction, but relative homelessness should always be higher given higher housing costs.

meritt 10y ago

Utah didn't solve homelessness. The primary "reduction" was changing the definition of chronic homelessness and now less people are being counted. http://www.aei.org/publication/on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-in-chronic-homelessness/ http://www.aei.org/publication/on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-...

ProAm 10y ago
So its like the US unemployment rate?
- organsnyder 10y ago
  When was the US unemployment rate definition changed? I know there are debates around whether the rate we normally talk about is the most important indicator, but the definition has remained the same for decades, AFAIK.
  - ProAm 10y ago
    Correct I see how I didn't explain well the point I was trying to make. Its always been the same, but it's a tad shady on what they actually count as unemployed. For instance they do not count discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers, or people who stopped looking because they simply cannot find work. The unemployment percent in the US is largely a political talking point/fodder wherein the government doesn't do much to change it.
    - organsnyder 10y ago
      As long as you're tracking the same metric over time, it's still useful. I haven't studied the data to back this up, but I suspect that it and other unemployment metrics will tend to follow parallel trajectories over time. That's not to say that we can ignore the other metrics—they obviously provide useful information—but it still provides a good year-over-year comparison. I see two scenarios that could be "shady": 1. The metric calculation is drastically changed (hasn't happened, to my knowledge) 2. The government somehow manages to "tweak" the economy in a way that artificially alters this metric (unlikely) Regarding unemployment percent: The government doesn't have a lot of direct control over this (though federal spending does provide tons of jobs, obviously), but policy certainly can cause major implications. Health care, banking, and environmental regulations (to name a few) can cause massive shifts in employment. Come to think of it, I can see a scenario where federal policy could keep the unemployment rate lower relative to other metrics: The Affordable Care Act made it easier for people to get coverage outside of employment. Perhaps this allowed some people to settle for less-than-full-time positions, or to remain unemployed for longer than they would have (perhaps to care for family, or to pursue an entrepreneurial dream, or education...). This could cause the traditional unemployment rate to remain artificially low, compared to before the ACA was implemented. No idea if this is actually true, and one could debate whether it's a good outcome or not, but it's an interesting possibility.

cpncrunch 10y ago

>A similar approach was first tried in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and New York City in the early 1990s. Does anyone have a reference for this? I did some searching, but didn't find anything. If anything, the articles I found just said that homelessness in LA was a continuing problem throughout the 80s until today.

mabbo 10y ago

The 'Housing First' model was really pushed hard by Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea. But he, like Lloyd Pendleton in this article, apparently figured out that it saves a lot of money, ideology be damned. Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals: prove that it will save money and let them lower taxes.

douche 10y ago
Would that it would be possible for the reverse to happen. Never will left-wing politicians lower tax rates.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jtedward 10y ago
  Obama lowered taxes, in fact no Democratic president has raised taxes during my lifetime (I'm 25). It's pretty strange people always claim this is a thing when it's just flat false.
  - refurb 10y ago
    That's only true if you ignore the ACA taxes.[1] [1]http://www.atr.org/full-list-ACA-tax-hikes-a6996 http://www.atr.org/full-list-ACA-tax-hikes-a6996
  - madenine 10y ago
    probably expecting a lot from username "douche"
    - douche 10y ago
      That's the best you can come up with? Go home and start over

hl5 10y ago

Homes for the homeless. What an obvious solution! May I suggest medical care for the sick next? I'm glad some cities are starting to recognize the level of dignity and hope a private residence with private facilities can give to impoverished families. Sadly it appears these types of programs seem to only be funded when wrapped in some questionable marketing or political gain.

itstriz 10y ago
Food for the hungry would be a good one too.

vondur 10y ago

Last time I was in Salt Lake, there were a bunch of homeless people camped out all over the place. It was really odd, I noticed some of them were just casually smoking weed. Still not as bad as it is here in the Southern California area.

perseusprime11 10y ago

I wish there is something we can do in New York City. In the last two years, I saw a significant increase in the number of homeless people in New York City. They have no home and take refuge in subways and the bathrooms at Penn Station.

thebosz 10y ago

Regardless of how effective or how it's just "changing the definition" at least it is helping. Unlike here in Portland where it's just ignored and occasionally the tent cities get pushed to a different area.

hackermailman 10y ago

Vancouver tried the same thing. The made a policy of eradicating homelessness by X date and the city bought up SROs to put them in and other housing options. The problem is once the rest of Canada's homeless heard about this they came in droves, often given one way bus tickets by police, so it's impossible to solve chronic homelessness without some kind of national effort. Utah this strategy works because there isn't a flood of people going there like they are San Francisco or LA's Skid Row. It would be great if governments could have some kind of yearly conference to compare data and strategies to figure out what works/doesn't work at scale.

brilliantcode 10y ago
Homelessness is a serious problem in Vancouver. Just walking along granville st., aka "entertainment district" (hard to NOT be snarky here too many awful memories) there's vagabond population along the sidewalk in front of luxury shops. They commit crimes because they are mentally ill and take drugs. They aggressively pan handle even while leeching off our generous social programs while the middle class can't even find proper homes. Worse, people support the population by pretending to be generous but in reality self serving their own ego to be perceived as a "nice & empathetic human". Pan handlers know this very well and exploit it. Even getting pissy and whiny when you refuse to give change. It's like they feel entitled to free money and too strung out to even put an effort in it. I've given money to street performers and people hustling. These homeless population in Vancouver are mostly drug addicts and broken humans who are unable to help themselves. They will buy drugs with the money you give them with high certainty. It's seriously putting inconvenience to the rest of the city and you are absolutely right that the rest of Canada's homeless population are given a one way greyhound ticket to Vancouver. I refuse to pay taxes towards people who have no desire to change their situation and instead feel entitled and constantly leeching off the backs of hard working folks who are also struggling. When the housing market collapses in Vancouver, the city is going to have a tough time forcefully relocating the homeless population.
3JPLW 10y ago
That's precisely what NACo — the National Association of (US) Counties — does. They have initiatives on both data driven justice[1] and housing[2]. 1. http://www.naco.org/resources/programs-and-services/data-driven-justice http://www.naco.org/resources/programs-and-services/data-dri... 2. http://www.naco.org/news/roof-of-their-own http://www.naco.org/news/roof-of-their-own

NewCathargo 10y ago

Give every homeless person a $20 thing of nicotine each month. Stop the ponzi scheme of housing costs. Teach them skills general enough to plug into a variety of jobs and specific enough to survive alongside automation. Giving a chronically homeless person a "home" doesn't make up for the completely shattered social network they have. And the shattered sense of civil conduct in a society which literally tossed them to the trash. My melancholy tells me the above will never happen. Homelessness is a shadow industry where nobody gets punished for letting relapses happen. Therefore, nobody "owns" performance in getting the homeless into a housed state. In the industry, talking points are more valuable than actual "performance".

brilliantcode 10y ago

So you redefined homelessness and end up counting less people in order to call it success.

Overtonwindow 10y ago

*From December 2015

rpmcmurphy 10y ago

Imagine what the states could do with the > $50 billion we are about to send to our already outsized military.

tn13 10y ago

Homelessness should not be a problem in USA where land is plenty. If homelessness is a problem it is mostly because cities are not growing horizontally fast enough.

randyrand 10y ago

As an aside, this is a perfect illustration of the states-rights approach going well. States are testing incubators for trying new ideas.

tomcam 10y ago
Amen, brother
therealdrag0 10y ago
For sure, but with state boarders so easy to cross, it can be messy to compare. Homeless, guns, etc, can all migrate.

eip 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o

m-j-fox 10y ago

Better yet, 100 miles west of San Francisco

dang 10y ago
Please don't comment like this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897306 and marked it off-topic.

ninju 10y ago

This an older article...and I think it might have been on HN already

Mz 10y ago

Maybe "enlightened self interest" as a governing principle will catch on.

tomcam 10y ago

This will sound hostile. It is not meant to. Didn't we do the "housing first" thing decades ago? The Projects in the Bronx? Cabrini Green in Chicago? Now most of those places are torn down or being gentrified or are miserable black holes of chaos and crime. It seems to me that it's really important that residents have some skin in the game, which may be the difference in the Utah program. It is also notable that the Mormon church has such deep involvement. Here in Seattle the Union Gospel Mission has been infinitely at dealing with homeless than the bureaucracy.

Unbeliever69 10y ago

The situation in Utah is FAR from perfect. I work near a building that was renovated to house the homeless. These places are often rampant with prostitution, drug dealing and other nefarious operations. In effect many now have a roof over their heads, but they now live in what some might consider slums.

ythn 10y ago
What would you have done differently had you been in charge?

tracker1 10y ago

Definitely better than when they were just buying bus tickets for the homeless to go to Phoenix and Albuquerque... (Fixing the homeless problem by making it someone else's problem)