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How do you distinguish between A) unnecessarily spending millions of dollars on a single homeless person and B) spending millions of dollars to reduce the other
by nkurz 8y ago
How 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...