4 ms·
Measuring "dollars per homeless person" is, IMO, worse than useless. The problem is that the better you do the job, the worse the number looks. If you manage to
by wolfgang42 8y ago
Measuring "dollars per homeless person" is, IMO, worse than useless. The problem is that the better you do the job, the worse the number looks. If you manage to house all but 1 person, suddenly it rockets into millions of dollars per remaining homeless person!
- gpm 8y agoIf there's one homeless person and you're spending millions of dollars on them, perhaps you should stop?
- nkurz 8y agoHow do you distinguish between A) unnecessarily spending millions of dollars on a single homeless person and B) spending millions of dollars to reduce the otherwise large homeless population to only one? The best approach is probably not to cut spending to zero and then wait to see what happens. But perhaps it's reasonable to cut spending by 10-25% and then monitor the results?
- gpm 8y agoBy distinguishing between funding to homeless people, and funding to at risk but still homed people? Also by making sure we are counting people correctly (if 10 people are all temporarily homeless at some point during the use of the funding, and then homed, we had 10 homeless people not 0).
- wolfgang42 8y agoSo as soon as someone moves from being classified as "homeless" to "homed", you have to shuffle around all the budgets for every service you're providing to them? This seems like a good way to increase bureaucratic overhead and ways for people to fall through the gaps, with the only advantage being neater numbers for bean-counting.
- gpm 8y agoIf we are trying to measure how much money we spend per homeless person we have to identify what portion of the money goes to them. That can just be done by measuring instead of budgeting before hand of course...
- dumbfoundded 8y agoThis $40K doesn't include emergency medical services, private programs, federal & state programs. It's just the city budget for the homeless. Any project should have metrics to judge its success and a reasonable budget to accomplish the goal. If you were given a budget of nearly $300M for 7,500 homeless, how would you decrease the number of homeless? If you really think outliers take up the majority of the cost, how many homeless could you house with what budget?
- wolfgang42 8y agoYou have completely misunderstood my point: if I housed 7,498 homeless with a budget of $300M, leaving just two homeless people on the streets, I would have then spent $150M per homeless person. You also have to keep spending money on someone for some amount of time after they stop being homeless, to keep them from becoming homeless again. I agree that metrics are useful, but using a terribly flawed metric just because it's the only one we have seems like a bad idea. (I will not respond to your other points about budgets because I don't have any easy answers for them--this subject is not my main area of expertise. I will leave it to others who are more informed than I to provide actual statistics and actionable suggestions elsewhere in these comments.)
- scrumbledober 8y agomeasuring dollars per homeless person is useless, you're right. SF isn't spending money on people who are homeless, they're spending money to prevent the number of homeless from rising. If suddenly all 7000 homeless people left san francisco they would still need to spend money on the system to keep others from falling into homelessness