6 ms·

As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they

As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness or whatever utopian goal sounds good. Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.

sjg007 5y ago
What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.
- hedora 5y ago
  Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
  - Swizec 5y ago
    > My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down. The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled. To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically. Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office. I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal. The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
- waheoo 5y ago
  Properly implementing OKRs. Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure. You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year. Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it. What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives. Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
- visualradio 5y ago
  In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%. The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
- paxys 5y ago
  You don't even have to build housing specifically for the homeless. You don't have to build BMR or affordable housing. Just build more housing, period, and the problem will eventually solve itself.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    The problem with saying this is that while it makes sense if you connect the dots, the path of those dots isn't direct so it's non-obvious to some. A government spending that money can't just build housing and have it solve the problem through market forces because the government won't be participating in the market that way. What a government has to do is incentivize the market, and through incentivizing the market (even if that's taking out many disincentives that have been put in place) cause market participants to build more housing. So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.
tehwebguy 5y ago
> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. I very much doubt that on both counts! But even still, I have a feeling that there is a very high cap for dollars spent directly helping homeless folks that reduce indirect spending 1:1 on other budget line items.
- prepend 5y ago
  I think the reasoning is that if you spend more money on healthcare you don’t necessarily get better outcomes, you’ll just spend more. Thus the US’ very high per person spend vs worse health outcomes. The issue isn’t that the US doesn’t spend enough, it’s that it spends on the wrong thing. Similarly with homelessness, spending $2600/month for temporary tents isn’t improved by adding funds. Doubling the money and providing twice as much tent space won’t help homelessness as much as longer term housing that would cost less. Or changing zoning to allow more housing that would definitely cost less. These are both important problems and need resources, but in some ways more funds are worse.
didibus 5y ago
> It costs an average of about $81,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California That's 6750$ per month. Pick your poison I guess.
vineyardmike 5y ago
>more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services. I've never heard of homeless searching for the best place too be homeless! Is there a source for this?
- visualradio 5y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht... "Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?" > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood. > Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state. > “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said. > L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless. > In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    "fell into homelessness in L.A. " Total weasel words. You move to LA with one week of money for hotel = "fell into homelessness in L.A.". In Seattle, the local group did a survey like this. About a quarter put their last housing zip code as the one with the shelter, in Pioneer Square, an expensive area if you aren't homeless. GIGO
- other_herbert 5y ago
  Sounds like LA just advertised themselves as pretty high on the list
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  It seems to be more that in cold climates governments are compelled to provide shelter for homeless people so they don't die on the street, whereas in warmer climates governments are okay with leaving them on the street. Both San Francisco and New York have similar proportions of homeless people, but New York has shelter beds for almost all of them whereas San Francisco has shelter beds for only 40%.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
In most counties, I honestly think they try to spend every last cent in there budget, in order to ask for more the following year. I live in a pretty good county (Marin County), but I am astonished over the waste of tax money. I am too young to remember pre-prop 13, but waste was so much. Every year, no matter how much they took in in taxes, it was spent the following year, according to my father. (That's why Jarvis wrote a book called, I'm Mad as Hell. I have an autographed copy someone threw away.) During the drought in the 70's ranchers were trucked in water, as a political favor. (I actually don't mind this one). Politicians were bought off legally with county tax money. Every night was a big hootenanny at Marin Joes. My point is there was a huge amount of waste. O.k.--today is much better? Yea--you would think? I used to work at a county beach while in college. One day the maintance guts were throwing tools into a dumptster. Perfectly good chainsaws, hand tools, etc. I asked what's up? They told me if they didn't throw away the "broken tools", their budget would not be the same. I went back there at night and took three chain saws I still have to this day. There's a department in my county called Open Space. They literally fill in their huge white trucks in the morning, throw some grass/litter in the back, and joy ride in the open space. They could nix this department, and cut back on police funds, and that money could go to a homeless fund. My county has no real crime. The cops are basically Revenue Collectors at this point. My point is they will never claim to have extra money, unless we demand it. I would like to see every bit of free County, federal, and state opened up to free camping. Homelessness is beyond debate. We need to act yesterday. Sorry about sounding so preachy, but I know too many people getting ticked for sleeping because they don't have a home. (Keep an eye on Sausalito, Ca. The authorities decided to get tough on anchor-outs. They decided to vigorously enforce a three day anchorage muni code. They went beyond enforcement. They broke laws, but It's hard to prove because their is no video evidence. For instance, they towed boats for no reason. It's the city worker's word against a boater. It's like our version against a cop's version. A code that everyone has disregarded for years, including luxury yacht owners, like Allen from Microsoft. He would spend weeks docked in the same spot. (He had a beautiful yacht though.) They wanted the low income boats out of their view. Rich people find poor people an eye sore. They were dirty homeless shiftless bums after all. Many older ladies were out there to. Probally druggies, or prostitutes? Just scummy people. Why should those wealthy residents have to look at that? (Ironically, every person who I have overheard saying, "Eye sore" has been genetically challenged aesthetically, but monetarily fit.) Well the boaters having nowhere to go, set up tents in Dunphy Park. They are neat, and only had one provoked criminal arrest. (There brilliant plan of homeless harassment backfired for now?). Oh yea, Richardson Bay has had Anchor Outs since before the 50's. (Yes--Homeless Harassment is alive an well. You can call it Broken Window whatever, but it's nothing more than harassing peopke until they move on.) The city told them to move to a toxic site, with a bunch of regulations, like early morning tent take down. One woman is disabled, and said she needed help setting up her tent, and needed somewhere to lie down during the day. Plus--a major symptom of depression is sleep reversal. Don't ask me how I know. The homeless fought back. A kind advocacy group sued the city, and got a temporary restraining order. In the USA, the Supreme court ruled you can't force homeless people to move, unless you have a bed for them. One win I love! Right now the situation is up in the air. I heard there is ongoing harrasement from authorities, but I don't know for sure. I'm getting tired. Just had the second vaccine dose, and it hit he hard. Flu symptoms for a day, and a half.)
spfzero 5y ago
Boy those two certainly haven't gotten better, that's for sure, even though the money spent on "solving" them has skyrocketed. It almost seems like the more money that gets poured in, the more expensive everything becomes.
toast0 5y ago
> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services. If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results. Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.

sjg007 5y ago

What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

hedora 5y ago
Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
- Swizec 5y ago
  > My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down. The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled. To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically. Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office. I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal. The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
waheoo 5y ago
Properly implementing OKRs. Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure. You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year. Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it. What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives. Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
visualradio 5y ago
In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%. The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
paxys 5y ago
You don't even have to build housing specifically for the homeless. You don't have to build BMR or affordable housing. Just build more housing, period, and the problem will eventually solve itself.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The problem with saying this is that while it makes sense if you connect the dots, the path of those dots isn't direct so it's non-obvious to some. A government spending that money can't just build housing and have it solve the problem through market forces because the government won't be participating in the market that way. What a government has to do is incentivize the market, and through incentivizing the market (even if that's taking out many disincentives that have been put in place) cause market participants to build more housing. So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.

tehwebguy 5y ago

> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. I very much doubt that on both counts! But even still, I have a feeling that there is a very high cap for dollars spent directly helping homeless folks that reduce indirect spending 1:1 on other budget line items.

prepend 5y ago
I think the reasoning is that if you spend more money on healthcare you don’t necessarily get better outcomes, you’ll just spend more. Thus the US’ very high per person spend vs worse health outcomes. The issue isn’t that the US doesn’t spend enough, it’s that it spends on the wrong thing. Similarly with homelessness, spending $2600/month for temporary tents isn’t improved by adding funds. Doubling the money and providing twice as much tent space won’t help homelessness as much as longer term housing that would cost less. Or changing zoning to allow more housing that would definitely cost less. These are both important problems and need resources, but in some ways more funds are worse.

didibus 5y ago

> It costs an average of about $81,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California That's 6750$ per month. Pick your poison I guess.

vineyardmike 5y ago

>more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services. I've never heard of homeless searching for the best place too be homeless! Is there a source for this?

visualradio 5y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht... "Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?" > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood. > Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state. > “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said. > L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless. > In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
- coryrc 5y ago
  "fell into homelessness in L.A. " Total weasel words. You move to LA with one week of money for hotel = "fell into homelessness in L.A.". In Seattle, the local group did a survey like this. About a quarter put their last housing zip code as the one with the shelter, in Pioneer Square, an expensive area if you aren't homeless. GIGO
other_herbert 5y ago
Sounds like LA just advertised themselves as pretty high on the list
laurencerowe 5y ago
It seems to be more that in cold climates governments are compelled to provide shelter for homeless people so they don't die on the street, whereas in warmer climates governments are okay with leaving them on the street. Both San Francisco and New York have similar proportions of homeless people, but New York has shelter beds for almost all of them whereas San Francisco has shelter beds for only 40%.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

In most counties, I honestly think they try to spend every last cent in there budget, in order to ask for more the following year. I live in a pretty good county (Marin County), but I am astonished over the waste of tax money. I am too young to remember pre-prop 13, but waste was so much. Every year, no matter how much they took in in taxes, it was spent the following year, according to my father. (That's why Jarvis wrote a book called, I'm Mad as Hell. I have an autographed copy someone threw away.) During the drought in the 70's ranchers were trucked in water, as a political favor. (I actually don't mind this one). Politicians were bought off legally with county tax money. Every night was a big hootenanny at Marin Joes. My point is there was a huge amount of waste. O.k.--today is much better? Yea--you would think? I used to work at a county beach while in college. One day the maintance guts were throwing tools into a dumptster. Perfectly good chainsaws, hand tools, etc. I asked what's up? They told me if they didn't throw away the "broken tools", their budget would not be the same. I went back there at night and took three chain saws I still have to this day. There's a department in my county called Open Space. They literally fill in their huge white trucks in the morning, throw some grass/litter in the back, and joy ride in the open space. They could nix this department, and cut back on police funds, and that money could go to a homeless fund. My county has no real crime. The cops are basically Revenue Collectors at this point. My point is they will never claim to have extra money, unless we demand it. I would like to see every bit of free County, federal, and state opened up to free camping. Homelessness is beyond debate. We need to act yesterday. Sorry about sounding so preachy, but I know too many people getting ticked for sleeping because they don't have a home. (Keep an eye on Sausalito, Ca. The authorities decided to get tough on anchor-outs. They decided to vigorously enforce a three day anchorage muni code. They went beyond enforcement. They broke laws, but It's hard to prove because their is no video evidence. For instance, they towed boats for no reason. It's the city worker's word against a boater. It's like our version against a cop's version. A code that everyone has disregarded for years, including luxury yacht owners, like Allen from Microsoft. He would spend weeks docked in the same spot. (He had a beautiful yacht though.) They wanted the low income boats out of their view. Rich people find poor people an eye sore. They were dirty homeless shiftless bums after all. Many older ladies were out there to. Probally druggies, or prostitutes? Just scummy people. Why should those wealthy residents have to look at that? (Ironically, every person who I have overheard saying, "Eye sore" has been genetically challenged aesthetically, but monetarily fit.) Well the boaters having nowhere to go, set up tents in Dunphy Park. They are neat, and only had one provoked criminal arrest. (There brilliant plan of homeless harassment backfired for now?). Oh yea, Richardson Bay has had Anchor Outs since before the 50's. (Yes--Homeless Harassment is alive an well. You can call it Broken Window whatever, but it's nothing more than harassing peopke until they move on.) The city told them to move to a toxic site, with a bunch of regulations, like early morning tent take down. One woman is disabled, and said she needed help setting up her tent, and needed somewhere to lie down during the day. Plus--a major symptom of depression is sleep reversal. Don't ask me how I know. The homeless fought back. A kind advocacy group sued the city, and got a temporary restraining order. In the USA, the Supreme court ruled you can't force homeless people to move, unless you have a bed for them. One win I love! Right now the situation is up in the air. I heard there is ongoing harrasement from authorities, but I don't know for sure. I'm getting tired. Just had the second vaccine dose, and it hit he hard. Flu symptoms for a day, and a half.)

spfzero 5y ago

Boy those two certainly haven't gotten better, that's for sure, even though the money spent on "solving" them has skyrocketed. It almost seems like the more money that gets poured in, the more expensive everything becomes.

toast0 5y ago

> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services. If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results. Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.