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Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage
- Mz 16y ago"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it." Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.
- harscoat 16y agoI remember a homeless called Lounis (after my studies, I joined Paris Firefighter Brigade), we collected him regularly because people would complain he was staying at their frontdoor. On our way to the hospital, he would sing with us in the truck, he would even do air guitar. The day some of my colleagues came back to the fire station after they collected his body on the street, we all felt like the police officers did for Murray.
- petercooper 16y agoThe crux of the matter: The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. I believe similar observations have been made in subsidizing the price of fruit and vegetables (or even bikes and gym memberships) vs the medical costs of bad diets and lack of exercise, too.
- Groxx 16y agoEspecially as meat is subsidized so heavily.
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- hop 16y agoThis guy and I'm sure a lot of others could be pretty well off if there was some type of rural co-op they could live and work on. It could save a lot of money and probably help these people a lot by getting them out of the city.
- qq66 16y agoA lot of homeless people cannot, or will not, live in such a situation. There are so many well-meaning people trying to help the homeless that those who stay homeless generally have a compelling reason why they are. Either they're episodically violent which makes them unsafe to house with other homeless people, or they've simply adapted to the vagrant lifestyle and don't know any other. Makes the problem much tougher to solve.
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- buro9 16y agoIt's not as simple as just throwing money at the problem and managing things differently. I've been homeless before and it's not pretty, a lot of the people who I met on the street during that time would not have been able to just take an apartment and that would be their problem solved. They are on the street for a reason and if the reason was purely financial then perhaps the apartment would help, but a lot of the time the reasons can be associated to mental health, poverty, drugs, alcoholism... and giving someone an apartment in those cases is unlikely to add anything to the solution. What those people need is real support and care. And an apartment will just isolate them and risks exacerbating the problems for them.
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- JadeNB 16y ago> What those people need is real support and care. And an apartment will just isolate them and risks exacerbating the problems for them. Not to say that I think that giving a homeless person a home will magically solve all his or her problems, but how does giving someone an apartment isolate him or her in a way that being on the street does not? (It's not a snide question; I've never been homeless, and maybe there's a stronger community than I see—but it seems unlikely that that community can provide the real mental and physical care that such an afflicted person would need, and that the people who can provide it find it easier to ignore a dirty person on the street than their next-door neighbours.)
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- statictype 16y agoI believe similar observations have been made in subsidizing the price of fruit and vegetables (or even bikes and gym memberships) vs the medical costs of bad diets and lack of exercise, too. Not sure if you were trying to make this point but: The reason many people don't eat enough fruit or go to the gym isn't because its too expensive.
- gaius 16y agoHere in the UK the welfare budget is nearly 6x the defense budget. Healthcare is around 3x. We're talking serious money here. Probably we spend as much on welfare and healthcare as the US spends on the military. And the results speak for themselves: chucking money at it is not the solution. Often in London a homeless person will ask for money to stay in a shelter overnight, but the shelters are free, funded by the local councils, and always have spare beds.
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_budget 190 social protection 105 health --- 295 total health & social 38 defence === 519 total population 62,041,708 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget 678 social security 676 medicare & medicaid --- 1354 total health & social 782 defense ==== 3518 total population 309,921,000
- petercooper 16y agoI had a look at similar numbers a few years back to back up a debate I was having and was surprised. The UK and US spend in the same order of magnitude per capita on public healthcare. Sadly, though, this isn't good. The US's healthcare budget covers a minority of the population whereas the UK's covers almost everyone. The only reason the US's budget is inflated is due to the extreme inefficiencies and price gouging that are rampant in the US healthcare market.
- commanda 16y ago"Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis." This is exactly why programs like these won't take off. It's hard to present this kind of complex analysis of the behavior of a system to the tax payers for exactly this reason. The average person probably votes their conscience, not what makes the most sense from scientific studies, which are generally not widely published anyway. There's no simple moral argument to be made for giving homeless people free apartments that they don't deserve, and most voters won't think through a proof that has more than like two steps.
- hga 16y ago"the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment" What amazing garbage. Well over half the homeless are such because they belong in a mental institution, the closing of which was a major successful crusade of the left through the '70s or so (many libertarians and some members of the right like Jerry Pournelle joined them in this and the more honest of them like Jerry admit the mistake). "The right" was entirely happy with "special treatment" for these people since that is the only humane way to accommodate them. (You have, I assume, spent a little time around a schizophrenic person? Their ability to think is PROFOUNDLY broken.) Antipsychotics were and are amazing wonder drugs: my Mom did her nursing residency in the '50s and part of that was working in a psych ward. Later she took a job at that same hospital and was amazed to see one of the previously hopeless cases productively working there as a janitor or the like. The problem is that antipsychotics are also seriously nasty drugs (even more so when the above crusade happened, before safe atypical antipsychotics were on the market (the first was so dangerous that you couldn't get the next month's prescription filled for your patient without sending in a blood sample)) and "compliance", getting people to take their meds, is for all too many an impossible challenge outside of an institutional setting. Note also that the "drugs and alcoholism" problems are all too often attempts to self-medicate. Anyway, we ("the right") believe these people deserve "special treatment" (the causes are mostly genetic after all) but the left has outlawed the only one that works. Not much we can do now but to pick up their bodies off the street when it's all over as harscoat relates.
- nathanmarz 16y agoThe Delancey Street Foundation is an organization that has recuperated thousands of people who have hit rock bottom. And they do it without any government funding (they're self-supporting). One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship out there. http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/ http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/ And if you're interested in the details of how the organization operates, I did some research and wrote about the organization on my blog: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-in-the-world.html http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-...
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- Herring 16y agoThe article is a bit too well written, if theres such a thing. I got about halfway without pausing.
- anamax 16y ago> An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. That assumes renters who don't try to destroy the place. However, some renters are considerably more destructive than others. However, the big problem is that it assumes that homelessness is solely due to a lack of resources to obtain a home. If that were true, SF would have far fewer homeless and the shelters would be full. Yet, many of SF's shelter beds are empty and folks who could be in the are on the street. Yes, they know about the beds - they prefer the street. Are you really sure that they'd take an efficiency apartment? Are you sure that they wouldn't try to destroy it? Someone pitching that as a solution should not only be aware of the possibilities but have reasons better than "an apartment is better than the street" because that's clearly not true for a large fraction of the relevant population.
- andrewvc 16y agoI think part of the point was that an apartment creates a sense of responsibility and pride in ownership a shelter bed does not. I don't think anyone's saying this is the one true solution, but it makes sense, and perhaps should be given more of a shot than it has been to date.
- barrkel 16y agoHave you considered the possibility that many homeless people are specifically uninterested in the responsibility of an apartment? We're not talking about children or immature teenagers here. IMO the bigger risk with homeless people is treating them with condescension, thinking you know best what they should do. Maybe you don't.
- andrewvc 16y agoYes, I have, which is why I said it wasn't a magic bullet, but something that should be given more of a shot. If it helps 10% of homeless get off the street, that could be a huge victory in and of itself. BTW, for someone so attuned to the sensitivity of the homeless to condescension, you seem to have no problem saturating your own speech with it.
- chunkbot 16y agoI believe that homelessness is cheaper to solve than to manage. However, it may be easier to manage (ignore) the problem than to solve.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoYep, that's generally how that kind of problem are solved..Close the eyes on it!
- jbeda 16y agoSeattle actually put this into practice. The city funds and supports homeless housing for the most expensive homeless in the city. There is no requirement for sobriety. The project is called 1811 Eastlake (http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake) and it is not without controversy. Studies of the outcomes and cost analysis has been published in JAMA. Here is a summary: http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf. My wife is an ER attending at Harborview, the hospital that sees most of these patients. Anecdotally, she has seen great outcomes out of the project, has toured it and is a big fan. (Interestingly, Dr. Michael Copass, the patriarch of the Harborview ED and a pioneer in modern medical response calls these individuals "urban nomads")
- joe_the_user 16y agoWhat I would ask about these "power law" situations: Do we have any idea what moves someone from bad cop to really bad cop or homeless to homeless-and-totally-down-and-out? While only a small number reach the "really bad" level, it seems plausible that there's a larger population who could move into that level if the competition or bad examples or whatever other restraining factors were removed? Sure, only a tiny minority is flagrantly offending at a given point but if one doesn't understand how this minority arises, one doesn't really understand the situation.