6 ms·

Also, Silicon Valley is all about making money. How do you make money solving homelessness?

convolvatron 6y ago
tradeable morality credits
fortran77 6y ago
There's money in homelessness, just like there's money in for-profit prisons. A great many people are employed in San Francisco working for publicly funded homeless programs. > Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the consensus remains that more is needed. (Source: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-homeless-decade-2010s-kositsky-navigation-center-friedenbach https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... ) That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end? And, indirectly, the Police make money from homelessness because they can use it to get their budgets increased.
- flashdance 6y ago
  > That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end? Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field? Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job. I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    Do you think the Police would like to see crime go to zero?
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    HN is downvoting you for saying that some people honestly want to improve the world.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      It’s hard for “honestly wanting to improve the world” to scale to organizations of thousands of people.
      - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        > Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job The parent is talking about individual's good intentions. And look at that, I'm getting downvoted as well.
        dang 6y ago
        Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop breaking the rules when posting here? We've had to ask you multiple times before.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Why else would you want a career in that field? The people who want a career in that field who actually interact with the homeless are pretty detached from the big decisions.
  - conanbatt 6y ago
    There's an estimate of 10.000 homeless people in SF. And the budget is in 400 million. At 40k a year per homeless person..how are they homeless. Answer: they aren't getting 40k of benefits.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      What's the homeless person to bureaucrat/middleman ratio? I'd be very curious to see a breakdown of what sort of organizations are involved, how many people are involved, and where all that money is actually flowing.
      - bifrost 6y ago
        Its VERY high. SF's budget is basically $40-50k per homeless person yet each person receives a fraction of that, maybe 10%, its incredibly inefficient. Its even been called "The Homeless Industrial Complex" by a variety of outspoken locals.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Much of that money is spent on housing and services for people who would be considered homeless if not for those very funds paying their rent.
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      A huge portion of that $400M is spent getting people off the streets - they aren't spending $400M on 10,000 homeless people. They're spending 400M on tens of thousands of housing insecure people and after all of the rent support, healthcare, and mental health expense, there are still 10,000 people that they haven't been able to get off the streets.
      - conanbatt 6y ago
        This is the SF housing project's self-defense argument. But the budget has doubled and homelessness has increased. It's also a sorry defense of the city gov to say that such a small city actually has much higher homelessness numbers that are masked by ludicrous spending.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    > Do you think the Police would like to see crime go to zero? Yes, any proper non corrupted police would love to see that.
- aerostable_slug 6y ago
  Also the lords of San Francisco's SROs quite like things the way they are, thank you very much. They are raking in guaranteed income and they get to pretend they care about solving societal ills.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  This is some offensive garbage -- talk to anyone working in any of those organizations, of course they want homelessness to end. More than anything. Seeing the most downtrodden people in society continually crushed is an awful experience for people on both sides of the table.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    Wow! If you disagree with something, it's "offensive garbage."
    - catalogia 6y ago
      This seems to be the way local SF politics works. It's no wonder nothing gets done.
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      I mean, you straight up said that the people working on homelessness in San Francisco are taking all the money and don't want to actually fix it, implying they'd rather have the streets full of homeless people than find something else to do -- "Offensive garbage" actually seems like a charitable opinion of your post. I'd encourage you to talk to a single person actually working on the problem. Literally anyone.
    - loco5niner 6y ago
      Well, true or not, you did make some pretty serious accusations.
- chongli 6y ago
  $364 million is a staggering amount. In one year! Imagine if they put that money into an endowment and gave each homeless person a basic income from the interest... But no, they can’t do that. It would piss too many people off. The problem with homelessness is that it’s always someone else’s problem. Everyone agrees that it should be dealt with, just that no one wants to deal with it themselves.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    $364 million at 3% interest is like $11m/year. That'd pay something like $100/month to each of the homeless people in a city where studios are closer to $2000/month. Not to mention the health and psych problems many of the homeless have.
    - chongli 6y ago
      $364 million per year, so the endowment grows every year. After just 10 years, the endowment will have grown to $3.64 billion. Also you can do a lot better than 3% if you invest the money wisely. You also don’t have to divide it equally among homeless people. You could start with a few and add more to the program over time, as the endowment grows. Those getting the money would be assessed based on potential to get off the streets permanently and find jobs, housing, etc.
      - mikeyouse 6y ago
        The benefits of taxation is that you don't need to build up an endowment, you can just pay it today. You could spend $364M today, and then next year, and then every year. Why introduce random financial engineering to the mix?
        chongli 6y ago
        Why introduce random financial engineering to the mix? Because then it pays for itself. Look at the Nobel prizes. Look at Harvard University. Look at the Norwegian pension fund. These are backed by HUGE endowments which pay for themselves with profits earned on the market. They are also extremely stable. On the other hand, look at Social Security in the US. Any sort of benefits program paid for by taxes is exposed to political interference. That makes them inherently unstable.
- seibelj 6y ago
  For a while I was involved in the private sector with companies that earned money from the "Lifeline" program (you may of heard of it called the "Obama Phone") that has been around since telco deregulation in the 80s. https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons... When Trump said he wanted to eliminate it, tons of politicians and whatnot defended it as essential to getting cell phones into the hands of poor people. Trump did reform it rather than eliminate it, putting stricter requirements and adding things (less payment to the companies, must be a smart phone, must provide some data, etc.). But up until this, I knew of one company that had about 30 employees and earned over $200mil per year directly from the government operating as an MVNO. The industry was rife with fraud (and likely still is for all I know, it was absolutely shocking before which is why they reformed it, but hopefully it's better now) - recipients had to fill out a stack of paperwork, but they would pay independent contractors to go to methadone clinics, homeless shelters, etc. with pre-filled paperwork and get people to just sign their name and hand them a phone. It was also a scam for the recipients who were in on it somewhat, as they would switch providers every month or sign up for multiple, and get gift cards (or booze, cigarettes etc.) from the independent contractors for doing so. Companies I worked with would have churn up to 80% per month so they constantly had to refill with "new" people who the independent contractors found. I have seen so much fraud in various government programs that have a veneer of "doing good" but the end result is legions of private companies that execute the mandate and collect the check. If you are an enterprising person and want easy money, government programs are a great place to look, which is sadly why it attracts so much fraud.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    What's interesting about the "Obama Phone" was that it was George W. Bush who started the program!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
If anything is the opposite: you make money by inflating the cost of housing, and homelessness is a product of inequality. Give free or extremely cheap housing to every homeless person and the lucrative real estate companies and investment funds will disappear.
- loco5niner 6y ago
  unfortunately, you will also end up with destroyed houses.
pengaru 6y ago
It's the vulnerable populations that get taken advantage of the most. There's obviously huge opportunity potential in solving homelessness. But the money might have to come from the government. Private prisons don't seem to mind.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mam2 6y ago
  Well then do it yourself.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    Surely you know the ability to identify an opportunity and the ability to capitalize on it are entirely orthogonal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kiliantics 6y ago
Right, homelessness is a consequence of structuring society around the accumulation of wealth, concentrating it into the hands of the few at the expense of the many (and at the serious expense of some very unfortunate people, leading to issues like homelessness). And Silicon Valley has proven itself very good at concentrating wealth. How can they act in a way that avoids this consequence without completely overturning their raison d'etre? This is very closely related to the idea of reform vs. revolution. Sometimes you just need to burn the whole thing down to get the outcome you want.

tradeable morality credits

There's money in homelessness, just like there's money in for-profit prisons. A great many people are employed in San Francisco working for publicly funded homeless programs. > Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the consensus remains that more is needed. (Source: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-homeless-decade-2010s-kositsky-navigation-center-friedenbach https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... ) That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end? And, indirectly, the Police make money from homelessness because they can use it to get their budgets increased.

flashdance 6y ago
> That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end? Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field? Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job. I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.
- fortran77 6y ago
  Do you think the Police would like to see crime go to zero?
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  HN is downvoting you for saying that some people honestly want to improve the world.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    It’s hard for “honestly wanting to improve the world” to scale to organizations of thousands of people.
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job The parent is talking about individual's good intentions. And look at that, I'm getting downvoted as well.
      - dang 6y ago
        Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop breaking the rules when posting here? We've had to ask you multiple times before.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Why else would you want a career in that field? The people who want a career in that field who actually interact with the homeless are pretty detached from the big decisions.
- conanbatt 6y ago
  There's an estimate of 10.000 homeless people in SF. And the budget is in 400 million. At 40k a year per homeless person..how are they homeless. Answer: they aren't getting 40k of benefits.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    What's the homeless person to bureaucrat/middleman ratio? I'd be very curious to see a breakdown of what sort of organizations are involved, how many people are involved, and where all that money is actually flowing.
    - bifrost 6y ago
      Its VERY high. SF's budget is basically $40-50k per homeless person yet each person receives a fraction of that, maybe 10%, its incredibly inefficient. Its even been called "The Homeless Industrial Complex" by a variety of outspoken locals.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Much of that money is spent on housing and services for people who would be considered homeless if not for those very funds paying their rent.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    A huge portion of that $400M is spent getting people off the streets - they aren't spending $400M on 10,000 homeless people. They're spending 400M on tens of thousands of housing insecure people and after all of the rent support, healthcare, and mental health expense, there are still 10,000 people that they haven't been able to get off the streets.
    - conanbatt 6y ago
      This is the SF housing project's self-defense argument. But the budget has doubled and homelessness has increased. It's also a sorry defense of the city gov to say that such a small city actually has much higher homelessness numbers that are masked by ludicrous spending.
- dathinab 6y ago
  > Do you think the Police would like to see crime go to zero? Yes, any proper non corrupted police would love to see that.
aerostable_slug 6y ago
Also the lords of San Francisco's SROs quite like things the way they are, thank you very much. They are raking in guaranteed income and they get to pretend they care about solving societal ills.
mikeyouse 6y ago
This is some offensive garbage -- talk to anyone working in any of those organizations, of course they want homelessness to end. More than anything. Seeing the most downtrodden people in society continually crushed is an awful experience for people on both sides of the table.
- fortran77 6y ago
  Wow! If you disagree with something, it's "offensive garbage."
  - catalogia 6y ago
    This seems to be the way local SF politics works. It's no wonder nothing gets done.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    I mean, you straight up said that the people working on homelessness in San Francisco are taking all the money and don't want to actually fix it, implying they'd rather have the streets full of homeless people than find something else to do -- "Offensive garbage" actually seems like a charitable opinion of your post. I'd encourage you to talk to a single person actually working on the problem. Literally anyone.
  - loco5niner 6y ago
    Well, true or not, you did make some pretty serious accusations.
chongli 6y ago
$364 million is a staggering amount. In one year! Imagine if they put that money into an endowment and gave each homeless person a basic income from the interest... But no, they can’t do that. It would piss too many people off. The problem with homelessness is that it’s always someone else’s problem. Everyone agrees that it should be dealt with, just that no one wants to deal with it themselves.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  $364 million at 3% interest is like $11m/year. That'd pay something like $100/month to each of the homeless people in a city where studios are closer to $2000/month. Not to mention the health and psych problems many of the homeless have.
  - chongli 6y ago
    $364 million per year, so the endowment grows every year. After just 10 years, the endowment will have grown to $3.64 billion. Also you can do a lot better than 3% if you invest the money wisely. You also don’t have to divide it equally among homeless people. You could start with a few and add more to the program over time, as the endowment grows. Those getting the money would be assessed based on potential to get off the streets permanently and find jobs, housing, etc.
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      The benefits of taxation is that you don't need to build up an endowment, you can just pay it today. You could spend $364M today, and then next year, and then every year. Why introduce random financial engineering to the mix?
      - chongli 6y ago
        Why introduce random financial engineering to the mix? Because then it pays for itself. Look at the Nobel prizes. Look at Harvard University. Look at the Norwegian pension fund. These are backed by HUGE endowments which pay for themselves with profits earned on the market. They are also extremely stable. On the other hand, look at Social Security in the US. Any sort of benefits program paid for by taxes is exposed to political interference. That makes them inherently unstable.
seibelj 6y ago
For a while I was involved in the private sector with companies that earned money from the "Lifeline" program (you may of heard of it called the "Obama Phone") that has been around since telco deregulation in the 80s. https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons... When Trump said he wanted to eliminate it, tons of politicians and whatnot defended it as essential to getting cell phones into the hands of poor people. Trump did reform it rather than eliminate it, putting stricter requirements and adding things (less payment to the companies, must be a smart phone, must provide some data, etc.). But up until this, I knew of one company that had about 30 employees and earned over $200mil per year directly from the government operating as an MVNO. The industry was rife with fraud (and likely still is for all I know, it was absolutely shocking before which is why they reformed it, but hopefully it's better now) - recipients had to fill out a stack of paperwork, but they would pay independent contractors to go to methadone clinics, homeless shelters, etc. with pre-filled paperwork and get people to just sign their name and hand them a phone. It was also a scam for the recipients who were in on it somewhat, as they would switch providers every month or sign up for multiple, and get gift cards (or booze, cigarettes etc.) from the independent contractors for doing so. Companies I worked with would have churn up to 80% per month so they constantly had to refill with "new" people who the independent contractors found. I have seen so much fraud in various government programs that have a veneer of "doing good" but the end result is legions of private companies that execute the mandate and collect the check. If you are an enterprising person and want easy money, government programs are a great place to look, which is sadly why it attracts so much fraud.
- fortran77 6y ago
  What's interesting about the "Obama Phone" was that it was George W. Bush who started the program!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

If anything is the opposite: you make money by inflating the cost of housing, and homelessness is a product of inequality. Give free or extremely cheap housing to every homeless person and the lucrative real estate companies and investment funds will disappear.

loco5niner 6y ago
unfortunately, you will also end up with destroyed houses.

pengaru 6y ago

It's the vulnerable populations that get taken advantage of the most. There's obviously huge opportunity potential in solving homelessness. But the money might have to come from the government. Private prisons don't seem to mind.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mam2 6y ago
Well then do it yourself.
- pengaru 6y ago
  Surely you know the ability to identify an opportunity and the ability to capitalize on it are entirely orthogonal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kiliantics 6y ago

Right, homelessness is a consequence of structuring society around the accumulation of wealth, concentrating it into the hands of the few at the expense of the many (and at the serious expense of some very unfortunate people, leading to issues like homelessness). And Silicon Valley has proven itself very good at concentrating wealth. How can they act in a way that avoids this consequence without completely overturning their raison d'etre? This is very closely related to the idea of reform vs. revolution. Sometimes you just need to burn the whole thing down to get the outcome you want.