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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

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.
      - tticvs 3y ago
        Correct, but screaming at people on the street is a being danger to society. And the choice is: should that person be prison or mandatory treatment?
        suzzer99 3y ago
        What if they just shuffle along mumbling to themselves, like 99% of them?
        tticvs 3y ago
        Everyone deserves safe housing, living among raving maniacs is not safe, ergo we need to house dangerous people like that separately. Ideally in a way that helps them the most. Shuffling mumblers are not dangerous.
        suzzer99 3y ago
        Right, which means it seems wrong to incarcerate them in a mental facility against their will. I'm assuming very few would willingly be incarcerated. Maybe there's a way to house them in some kind of voluntary mental facility only for non-dangerous mentally ill people. They can come and go during the day. But at least they have a roof over their heads, someone to look after them, provide clean clothes, etc. Feels like someone must have already tried this and none of the mentally ill homeless were interested.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  Implying that if you don't want to live in rule based housing you should be institutionalized ?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    This is the root of the question - should someone of sound mind and body be prohibited from sleeping rough?
  - goatlover 3y ago
    If the alternative is you're causing problems for the public like creating unsanitary and unsafe conditions, then yes. If you don't do those things like the invisible homeless, then no of course not. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be help for those homeless people getting back to having a home, but that's a different matter. If you really prefer being a vagrant, don't trash or block public places and nobody will care.
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

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.
    - tticvs 3y ago
      Correct, but screaming at people on the street is a being danger to society. And the choice is: should that person be prison or mandatory treatment?
      - suzzer99 3y ago
        What if they just shuffle along mumbling to themselves, like 99% of them?
        tticvs 3y ago
        Everyone deserves safe housing, living among raving maniacs is not safe, ergo we need to house dangerous people like that separately. Ideally in a way that helps them the most. Shuffling mumblers are not dangerous.
        suzzer99 3y ago
        Right, which means it seems wrong to incarcerate them in a mental facility against their will. I'm assuming very few would willingly be incarcerated. Maybe there's a way to house them in some kind of voluntary mental facility only for non-dangerous mentally ill people. They can come and go during the day. But at least they have a roof over their heads, someone to look after them, provide clean clothes, etc. Feels like someone must have already tried this and none of the mentally ill homeless were interested.
moonchrome 3y ago
Implying that if you don't want to live in rule based housing you should be institutionalized ?
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is the root of the question - should someone of sound mind and body be prohibited from sleeping rough?
- goatlover 3y ago
  If the alternative is you're causing problems for the public like creating unsanitary and unsafe conditions, then yes. If you don't do those things like the invisible homeless, then no of course not. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be help for those homeless people getting back to having a home, but that's a different matter. If you really prefer being a vagrant, don't trash or block public places and nobody will care.

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