8 ms·

What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways. A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compar

by abeppu 3y ago

What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways. A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting people in them. Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live. Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption, where organizations that provide 'services' have good relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness" concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put them into homes. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

aorloff 3y ago
We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street. But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  What is the fraction of people that could have housing and are choosing not to receive it, and the fraction that would accept housing but has not been offered it?
- bombcar 3y ago
  That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem. I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to be better than a tent under a bridge.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    We got rid of institutionalization for very good reason. Many of them outright abused the people under their care. Cleaning up the system is hard. Many of the homeless have mental issues such that they cannot figure out how to report abuse even if it would be listened to, and of course institutions have easy means to ensure you can't report things. (or you can report, but the person doing the abuse investigates and finds nothing wrong)
    - shuckles 3y ago
      It was a combination of abuses at psychiatric facilities and the belief that new drugs would "solve" mental health issues.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      We had problems with abuse in many institutions (schools, churches, nursing homes) but we didn't get rid of all those. It would cost, but you can externally monitor and correct institutions if you have entirely separate people doing it. Or - livestream everything and let the public monitor it. (Obviously this can't be done for various reasons, but we now have the technology to literally record it all.)
      - suzzer99 3y ago
        The other argument is that it seems fundamentally wrong to incarcerate someone against their will who isn't a danger to society.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There's a "missing middle" that we cannot provide in our current society. Nobody can provide "flop houses" where drugs and alcohol use are ignored unless you're harming someone, so there's nothing between sleeping rough under the bridge and being sober in a shelter. The liability alone would prevent any non-government agency from doing it, and even the government is scared.
    - hackernewds 3y ago
      Why should government provide this? It creates a perverse incentive as we observe in modern day SF
      - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        The context is getting people off the street. If we don't care about that, then no, it shouldn't.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Because nobody else can provide it without being sued into oblivion.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The problem with flop houses that don’t have drug and alcohol restrictions is that the other residents suffer and things fall apart quickly. These aren’t people with great self control. Even homeless with drug and alcohol abuse problems will stay away from these places because they are too dangerous.
      - 3y ago
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  Then figure out what rules can and cannot work. I listened to a podcast were a vet's fucking service dog disallowed him from getting into rehab. A service dog!
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    Disallowed him is a neat framing for, he made a hard conscious choice.
    - EatingWithForks 3y ago
      Service animals are medical equipment my dude. It would be as immoral as claiming someone can only go to rehab if they give up their insulin or their wheelchair.
      - foobiekr 3y ago
        It really depends on if it’s an actual service dog or one of the emotional support animals.
    - freeone3000 3y ago
      Let people have something. Let them have one persistent thing that they care about and care for. It’s a dog.
    - felix_n 3y ago
      You probably still won't get it, but replace "dog" with "kid" or "friend" and say that sentence again. That might give you a sense of how attached a lot of people are to their dogs.
- abeppu 3y ago
  It's not a binary. SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites. Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services. Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
  - km3r 3y ago
    I'm glad they aren't just buying up existing housing stock. We have a housing shortage, and subsidizing demand will just further send prices up for everyone else. Net new housing, even if more expensive, will do far more good overall.
    - abeppu 3y ago
      I'm all for net new housing. And I think we should green-light new residential projects faster. But telling currently homeless people to _wait_ for new projects to be planned and built, when there's already a glut of vacant condos struggling to sell seems cruel. I'm not saying the city needs to bid aggressively -- but when the market slows down, why not get a deal?
  - shuckles 3y ago
    Most of the $5k/tent was in the services required for a high-needs population. As someone who has been impacted by a building set on fire by a meth addicted neighbor, simply placing high needs homeless people who often have serious mental health or drug abuse issues, in apartments isn't the end of the story. In many cases, it makes the lives of other residents of the building worse, as evidenced by the issues (including high rate of nuisance evictions) plaguing SROs in SF. Santa Clara County tried a random assignment housing first experiment in 2021 where homeless people given apartments died at roughly the same rates from drug overdose, etc. than homeless people who didn't receive housing. For these reasons and more, it makes a lot of sense to not acquire one-off units in existing buildings for PSH, and Prop C set asides for PSH instead of shelter or whatever the city deemed most useful for homeless people is kind of downstream of nonprofit politics and not a statement about voter mandates or what's best for homeless people.
- axus 3y ago
  Why does the housing need rules, if it's "single-family homes"?
- worik 3y ago
  > But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations Plenty of peoples in the WSJ story were not "service resistant" The services are inadequate
gamblor956 3y ago
Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure. In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse). For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse, treatment first is the only viable solution, but we're not legally allowed to force someone into treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger to themselves or others.
- bombcar 3y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job". It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.
- thereisnospork 3y ago
  It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type program for violating the laws that make them incompatible. Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory' policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like property damage and illegal drug use. [0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.
- abeppu 3y ago
  > For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?
josho 3y ago
I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable. Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies. The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then their political ambitions likely get killed. This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost effective with worse outcomes. My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
- bluGill 3y ago
  We are talking about California - the conservatives don't have power.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  > My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away. For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?
- splitstud 3y ago
  [dead]
- marcusverus 3y ago
  California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major cities. Conservatives are not the problem.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    How is policy directed? I'm in Los Angeles and it's mostly by business and real estate interests. Republicans, like Rick Caruso, run as Democrats because that's how you get elected here. It's a meaningless label. They'll do culture war signaling like support for pride month to their Twitter feed but when it comes to actual policy, for instance, the "defunding" of the LAPD which just last month included 780 more police, a new helicopter ... https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ an increase of $118,000,000, it's a different story. On homelessness, actual leftists advocate for strong regulation on housing costs, bans on speculation, criminalization of landlords who do illegal evictions, seizing of idle real estate for redistributive housing, things like that. You may disagree, but that's what the actual left position is. It's not buying new helicopters for the cops or giving them 100 million to do encampment sweeps where they throw away medication and wheelchairs and then classify it as "homeless abatement". The policy, in practice, is increased money for police, shelters without storage or mail services, encampment sweeps, and a blind eye to landlord and market forces. In a Venn diagram with most conservative approaches, it's a pretty significant crossover.
hackernewds 3y ago
Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money directly does not help them. Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
- abeppu 3y ago
  I'm _not_ saying give them the money directly. > Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades. I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first" has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot for them.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Edit: Unlike the sibling poster I am saying it give it to them directly. I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from that $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no they do drugs?! like the heaviest drug users I've ever met aren't white collar. Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary spending every month. Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that would be life changing to the average american household per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn't change lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been traumatized by homelessness and stuck. In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new wife.
spurgu 3y ago
Or, let people build their own housing. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-homeless-cob-on-wood-village https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-home... Allocate some land for this, let people create their own community/ies. Isn't America supposed to be about freedom?
meowtimemania 3y ago
We've tested housing first programs in SF. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20 https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets. We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated. I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should be supported in a much different way than we support drug addicts.
- worik 3y ago
  > 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets You are cherry picking statistics Housing first has been shown over and over again to be a better solution than expecting people to recover their lives before they get any help What are your counterfactuals? How many die with no help? Where do those numbers even come from? Basically I am calling this out as disinformation. Lies
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    I'm quoting a tweet from the president of Y Combinator. I'm not against giving people housing, but I think there needs to be a sobriety requirement. Why would putting someone in a house cure them of their addiction? Put them through rehab, then give them a house when they leave rehab.
    - kristofferR 3y ago
      They use drugs because they live on the streets. Treating a symptom instead of the cause is stupid, especially if the symptom (drug use) will likely return as soon as they return to the streets after rehab/prison.
      - smsm42 3y ago
seiferteric 3y ago
IMO The issue is that anytime more money becomes available, CA government/bureaucracy sucks it up. Lots of state jobs created to run these programs that ultimately do little good. Seems more like middle class jobs program than actually attempting to solve the problem.
dbrueck 3y ago
Utah has been doing a housing first program for about 20 years. It has definitely helped a lot of people, but it hasn't really solved the problem either. (I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a bunch of other things - who knows). https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homelessness-strategy-question https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homel...
Nifty3929 3y ago
"... or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments" A common misconception - but money is not housing. There are no extra 1BD units available. We could use this money to outbid other people to put the current homeless in those places, displacing others and somewhat increasing overall rent prices (and/or waiting lists). But I don't think that's what you intend. In the end, if we want more people to have housing, then we have to allow more housing to be built. It's not (just) a money problem.

by abeppu 3y ago

aorloff 3y ago

We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street. But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.

ncallaway 3y ago
What is the fraction of people that could have housing and are choosing not to receive it, and the fraction that would accept housing but has not been offered it?
bombcar 3y ago
That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem. I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to be better than a tent under a bridge.
- bluGill 3y ago
  We got rid of institutionalization for very good reason. Many of them outright abused the people under their care. Cleaning up the system is hard. Many of the homeless have mental issues such that they cannot figure out how to report abuse even if it would be listened to, and of course institutions have easy means to ensure you can't report things. (or you can report, but the person doing the abuse investigates and finds nothing wrong)
  - shuckles 3y ago
    It was a combination of abuses at psychiatric facilities and the belief that new drugs would "solve" mental health issues.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    We had problems with abuse in many institutions (schools, churches, nursing homes) but we didn't get rid of all those. It would cost, but you can externally monitor and correct institutions if you have entirely separate people doing it. Or - livestream everything and let the public monitor it. (Obviously this can't be done for various reasons, but we now have the technology to literally record it all.)
    - suzzer99 3y ago
      The other argument is that it seems fundamentally wrong to incarcerate someone against their will who isn't a danger to society.
gamblor956 3y ago
On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There's a "missing middle" that we cannot provide in our current society. Nobody can provide "flop houses" where drugs and alcohol use are ignored unless you're harming someone, so there's nothing between sleeping rough under the bridge and being sober in a shelter. The liability alone would prevent any non-government agency from doing it, and even the government is scared.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    Why should government provide this? It creates a perverse incentive as we observe in modern day SF
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      The context is getting people off the street. If we don't care about that, then no, it shouldn't.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Because nobody else can provide it without being sued into oblivion.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The problem with flop houses that don’t have drug and alcohol restrictions is that the other residents suffer and things fall apart quickly. These aren’t people with great self control. Even homeless with drug and alcohol abuse problems will stay away from these places because they are too dangerous.
    - 3y ago
EatingWithForks 3y ago
Then figure out what rules can and cannot work. I listened to a podcast were a vet's fucking service dog disallowed him from getting into rehab. A service dog!
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Disallowed him is a neat framing for, he made a hard conscious choice.
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    Service animals are medical equipment my dude. It would be as immoral as claiming someone can only go to rehab if they give up their insulin or their wheelchair.
    - foobiekr 3y ago
      It really depends on if it’s an actual service dog or one of the emotional support animals.
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    Let people have something. Let them have one persistent thing that they care about and care for. It’s a dog.
  - felix_n 3y ago
    You probably still won't get it, but replace "dog" with "kid" or "friend" and say that sentence again. That might give you a sense of how attached a lot of people are to their dogs.
abeppu 3y ago
It's not a binary. SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites. Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services. Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
- km3r 3y ago
  I'm glad they aren't just buying up existing housing stock. We have a housing shortage, and subsidizing demand will just further send prices up for everyone else. Net new housing, even if more expensive, will do far more good overall.
  - abeppu 3y ago
    I'm all for net new housing. And I think we should green-light new residential projects faster. But telling currently homeless people to _wait_ for new projects to be planned and built, when there's already a glut of vacant condos struggling to sell seems cruel. I'm not saying the city needs to bid aggressively -- but when the market slows down, why not get a deal?
- shuckles 3y ago
  Most of the $5k/tent was in the services required for a high-needs population. As someone who has been impacted by a building set on fire by a meth addicted neighbor, simply placing high needs homeless people who often have serious mental health or drug abuse issues, in apartments isn't the end of the story. In many cases, it makes the lives of other residents of the building worse, as evidenced by the issues (including high rate of nuisance evictions) plaguing SROs in SF. Santa Clara County tried a random assignment housing first experiment in 2021 where homeless people given apartments died at roughly the same rates from drug overdose, etc. than homeless people who didn't receive housing. For these reasons and more, it makes a lot of sense to not acquire one-off units in existing buildings for PSH, and Prop C set asides for PSH instead of shelter or whatever the city deemed most useful for homeless people is kind of downstream of nonprofit politics and not a statement about voter mandates or what's best for homeless people.
axus 3y ago
Why does the housing need rules, if it's "single-family homes"?
worik 3y ago
> But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations Plenty of peoples in the WSJ story were not "service resistant" The services are inadequate

gamblor956 3y ago

Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure. In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse). For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse, treatment first is the only viable solution, but we're not legally allowed to force someone into treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger to themselves or others.

bombcar 3y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job". It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.
thereisnospork 3y ago
It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type program for violating the laws that make them incompatible. Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory' policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like property damage and illegal drug use. [0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.
abeppu 3y ago
> For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse Where did you get this number? Do you think that number is a constant, and doesn't vary with the cost of housing?

josho 3y ago

I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable. Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies. The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then their political ambitions likely get killed. This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost effective with worse outcomes. My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.

bluGill 3y ago
We are talking about California - the conservatives don't have power.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
> My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away. For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?
splitstud 3y ago
[dead]
marcusverus 3y ago
California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major cities. Conservatives are not the problem.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  How is policy directed? I'm in Los Angeles and it's mostly by business and real estate interests. Republicans, like Rick Caruso, run as Democrats because that's how you get elected here. It's a meaningless label. They'll do culture war signaling like support for pride month to their Twitter feed but when it comes to actual policy, for instance, the "defunding" of the LAPD which just last month included 780 more police, a new helicopter ... https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ an increase of $118,000,000, it's a different story. On homelessness, actual leftists advocate for strong regulation on housing costs, bans on speculation, criminalization of landlords who do illegal evictions, seizing of idle real estate for redistributive housing, things like that. You may disagree, but that's what the actual left position is. It's not buying new helicopters for the cops or giving them 100 million to do encampment sweeps where they throw away medication and wheelchairs and then classify it as "homeless abatement". The policy, in practice, is increased money for police, shelters without storage or mail services, encampment sweeps, and a blind eye to landlord and market forces. In a Venn diagram with most conservative approaches, it's a pretty significant crossover.

hackernewds 3y ago

Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money directly does not help them. Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.

abeppu 3y ago
I'm _not_ saying give them the money directly. > Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades. I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first" has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot for them.
Spivak 3y ago
Edit: Unlike the sibling poster I am saying it give it to them directly. I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from that $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no they do drugs?! like the heaviest drug users I've ever met aren't white collar. Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary spending every month. Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that would be life changing to the average american household per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn't change lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been traumatized by homelessness and stuck. In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new wife.

spurgu 3y ago

Or, let people build their own housing. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-homeless-cob-on-wood-village https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/oakland-home... Allocate some land for this, let people create their own community/ies. Isn't America supposed to be about freedom?

meowtimemania 3y ago

We've tested housing first programs in SF. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20 https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets. We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated. I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should be supported in a much different way than we support drug addicts.

worik 3y ago
> 25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets You are cherry picking statistics Housing first has been shown over and over again to be a better solution than expecting people to recover their lives before they get any help What are your counterfactuals? How many die with no help? Where do those numbers even come from? Basically I am calling this out as disinformation. Lies
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  I'm quoting a tweet from the president of Y Combinator. I'm not against giving people housing, but I think there needs to be a sobriety requirement. Why would putting someone in a house cure them of their addiction? Put them through rehab, then give them a house when they leave rehab.
  - kristofferR 3y ago
    They use drugs because they live on the streets. Treating a symptom instead of the cause is stupid, especially if the symptom (drug use) will likely return as soon as they return to the streets after rehab/prison.
    - smsm42 3y ago

seiferteric 3y ago

IMO The issue is that anytime more money becomes available, CA government/bureaucracy sucks it up. Lots of state jobs created to run these programs that ultimately do little good. Seems more like middle class jobs program than actually attempting to solve the problem.

dbrueck 3y ago

Utah has been doing a housing first program for about 20 years. It has definitely helped a lot of people, but it hasn't really solved the problem either. (I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a bunch of other things - who knows). https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homelessness-strategy-question https://www.cato.org/blog/evidence-calls-housing-first-homel...

Nifty3929 3y ago

"... or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments" A common misconception - but money is not housing. There are no extra 1BD units available. We could use this money to outbid other people to put the current homeless in those places, displacing others and somewhat increasing overall rent prices (and/or waiting lists). But I don't think that's what you intend. In the end, if we want more people to have housing, then we have to allow more housing to be built. It's not (just) a money problem.