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As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has

As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless. Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and having an indoor bed to sleep on doesn't solve that. HN people who have never experienced housing insecurity in their lives will wax poetic about how many homeless turn down help because they turn down shelters, but this is a totally wrong, ignorant, and compassionless take. Homeless people turn down shelters because for many homeless, shelters aren't help--they're worse than sleeping on the street. Shelters are at best a mild alleviation of suffering for those homeless for whom the tradeoffs of living in a shelter are worth it. The solution to homelessness is not mental health services: mental health services are totally ineffective when one is suffering the ongoing trauma of homelessness. Mental health services are a much needed measure to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place, but they're utterly ineffective in getting people who are homeless into homes. The solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive down the prices of housing, and that would hurt the pocketbooks of people with power and money. That's why no money is being invested into solving homelessness. Until we as a society stop blindingly trusting rich people to be benevolent, this problem (and any other problem which rich people benefit from) will not be solved.

rcme 3y ago
> The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive down the prices of housing Giving homes to the homeless would increased demand for housing, which would increase the price of houses, no?
- jrowen 3y ago
  I think they mean building mass affordable/free new housing rather than using existing stock.
  - rcme 3y ago
    The structures built on land usually depreciate over time. It’s the land value that appreciates. So building new stock would still increase demand for land which would increase prices everywhere.
    - jrowen 3y ago
      Existing structures targeting lower density and higher cost per square foot could be repurposed and optimized for affordability. Even policy changes regarding what new projects are permissible would go a long way. Are you making the argument that it's an economic/geographic impossibility to house more people for less money rather than an issue of political/social will?
      - rcme 3y ago
        I’m not saying it’s impossible to house the homeless. The OC was saying that the homeless is not housed because building houses for the homeless would lower real estate prices. I was just pointing out that it’s likely the opposite would happen: real estate prices would go up. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Think about it like this: housing the homeless is a subsidy. Subsidies increase demand.
jrowen 3y ago
Interesting points. Are there more effective programs elsewhere that build more hospitable/restorative spaces? Put another way, are there organizations doing "the right thing" based on the most current research? Having lived and worked near a lot of homeless people it's fascinated me for years but aside from volunteering a few times have not delved too deeply into the issue. Anecdotally, much of the "disturbance" created by the homeless seems to stem from a small number of individuals that many would describe as "too far gone." Is that a fair take and is there an effective solution to that? What is a reasonable estimate for the percentage of homeless that more or less prefer living peacefully on the street as long as they can get by? Is this a segment to be specifically facilitated, are there efforts to do so?
jdjsbaosbs 3y ago
> shelters are not homes > Solution to homelessness is not mental health services > Solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless... I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes. How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property and give it to people without homes? We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Also where should these homes be? Should they all be in urban areas like SF or perhaps in smaller cities/towns where the homes are cheaper? Which neighborhoods should these homes be in? I don't know what the solution to homelessness is, but this doesn't seem like a viable solution.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes. I didn't say we should stop spending on those things, I said that spending money on those things does not solve homelessness. > We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. Notably, in places where this has been tried, the effectiveness of giving people homes is such that it's cheaper to give them homes than to do what we're doing. > What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. If your criticism is that I didn't draft a detailed legislation in a Hacker News post: that's the normal way that people write Hacker News posts. These are obviously not unanswerable questions as you are presenting them to be, but there would need to be some work to figure out what good answers are. Obviously. > Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? Surely you could come up with a solution to this problem if you were trying to solve it instead of argue against helping homeless people. A higher minimum wage, perhaps? Better aid for people in lower income brackets? > What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? Bro, your moral compass is broken. This isn't difficult--you're just making up absurd problems. If a person is homeless and they don't qualify, the qualifications are wrong. That's obvious, and the only reason it's not obvious to you is that your goals are about maintaining a fundamentally broken system rather than creating a society that actually cares for its citizens. > If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Given we demonstrably have billionaires "working" for money far beyond the ability to spend the money they make, I'm not sure why you suddenly think that greed stops at "I have a place to live" when it's convenient for your argument. > How does that work in reality? How does what we're doing work in reality? (It doesn't).
phendrenad2 3y ago
You didn't go into depth enough about why shelters are bad. They're not even a mild alleviation to living on the street, they're actually worse. There are homeless criminals who go to shelters just to steal from other homeless. Many homeless become addicted in shelters. We spent $17b making the lives of the homeless worse.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I don't think homes will help on their own. A more comprehensive system is needed. You get a place to stay and a living wage, even for doing absolutely nothing. Because otherwise, how are you going to recover? The second part that I think is really important is that we should look at this large country and do these things in places where there is space. Once can easily imagine a stretch of land north of Palmdale, CA where we can build hundreds of cheap houses connected to a couple of warehouses where we can treat people and where we can provide some sort of busywork for them. And yes, we'd be overpaying them. That's fine. But I think it's unreasonable for Los Angeles to try and get housing in this overheated market. It doesn't make sense, you're paying so much for so little.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  I'm mostly on board with what you're saying, but I'm not sure why the busywork component is necessary. If the concern is that they'll be bored if unoccupied, there are other activities that are more therapeutic. If the concern is that they won't be able to build self-esteem without a sense of purpose, then having them do purposeless work is just trying to "trick" them into feeling self-esteem, and most people won't be fooled. I suspect the underlying thing here is a fundamental problem in our society, which is that we believe people only have worth if they can provide some sort of tangible resources or service through work, and that's fundamentally wrong. First off, the richest and most valued people in our society don't work and aren't providing value, they just profit off of other people's work. And looking at the arc of technological progress, there has been less and less need for human labor--at some point human labor will be unnecessary as the machines are able to operate themselves. At that point, I hope we aren't forcing everyone to perform busy work so we can justify letting those who own the machines live in lavish excess while everyone else lives in squalor; I'd hope we would all benefit from technology and be able to live lives of leisure.
jrowen 3y ago
In thinking more about this, I'm starting to feel like developing solutions specifically for the most mentally ill/unstable individuals is important. 1) They're a danger to everyone including other homeless. 2) They have an outsize impact on people's frustration with and perception of homeless people. Walking down the street and worrying about being accosted by the guy yelling at himself is a powerfully bad experience. Walking by a couple guys in tents or sleeping bags may not be everyone's cup of tea but it's not going to emotionally scar anyone. 3) This segment is the hardest for us to confront on a human level, we want to believe in rehabilitation, that we can help, so the resources (shelters/homes) are designed for the most capable of homeless, kind of ignoring the elephant in the room. 4) Have there been mental health hospitals made specifically for the homeless? It seems that the most mentally ill of them basically need intensive care to even have a shot at some degree of rehabilitation.* Unlike a shelter with services this would be involuntary and they would not be able to leave until meeting some criteria. May be a little draconian but it beats constant interactions with police and going in and out of jail. 5) A lot of the "regular" homeless people I encounter don't really seem that interested in working their way towards a job and a house. They seem fairly content with their lifestyle. With the most viscerally troubling aspect of homelessness being mitigated, maybe we can push more toward normalization: sanction the tent city, provide some light services/development, give them a bit of dignity and the peace of mind of not being a criminal. Seems a lot cheaper and more effective than building shelters or houses and relocating etc. People would probably hang out/sleep in the street/sidewalk less, and those that do could be ushered to the acceptable area instead of the farcical "you can't be here...or anywhere, technically, but just move somewhere else for now." Does this make any sense? Has stuff like this been tried? * In general I think this is one of the big issues with homelessness - a lot of them need care more than anything else. As in someone literally holding their hand every day, preventing them from regressing to their habits, and (with infinite patience) constantly reassuring and rebuilding their psyche, until their brain is sufficiently rewired (a timespan measured in years). The problem is that the number of people that could use this kind of care is far greater the number of people that are willing/able to provide it, but developing programs around that could be an effective use of the funding.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  No, it doesn't make sense, and yes, most of this has been tried. 1. The vast majority aren't. The few that are, aren't going to be fixed by mental health services, because as I said, mental health services are totally ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of being homeless. And the fact that you said "including other homeless" doesn't fix the fact that your #1 concern is that homeless people are dangerous, not that homeless people are suffering. 2. Again, your concern is that someone will be traumatized by hearing someone talk to them in a way that they don't like, rather than that someone will be traumatized by being homeless? 3. Everyone knows that homeless people are mentally ill and is happy to talk about it: that's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that they are mentally ill because we as a society are unwilling to give them the only help that is effective: homes. 4. The results of forcibly imprisoning people are predictably bad. I'm not aware of any forcible treatment programs for the homeless, but this has never worked for anything else and I'm not sure why you'd think it would work for this. It again sounds a lot more like you're trying to help people who are scared of homeless people, rather than help homeless people. Why on earth would you think this would work? What, you imprison someone for 6 months or a year and force them to act "normal" in a situation that's not normal, then throw them back on the street and somehow they'll be able to cope with being homeless long enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? 5. Alternative hypothesis: the homeless people you encounter aren't interested in the help you're offering because the help you're offering is of the flavor you've proposed in this post, i.e., not help. * You seem absurdly confident that homeless people don't need what literally everyone else by definition has: a home. Why? What habit do you think you'll be able to build in them that will overcome lack of privacy or inability to keep their possessions safe? Why are the funds even a concern here when we have people so rich that one of them could literally build homes for every homeless person in the US and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world? We have enough resources to house the homeless right now, but we will never have enough resources to satisfy rich people's greed.

rcme 3y ago

> The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive down the prices of housing Giving homes to the homeless would increased demand for housing, which would increase the price of houses, no?

jrowen 3y ago
I think they mean building mass affordable/free new housing rather than using existing stock.
- rcme 3y ago
  The structures built on land usually depreciate over time. It’s the land value that appreciates. So building new stock would still increase demand for land which would increase prices everywhere.
  - jrowen 3y ago
    Existing structures targeting lower density and higher cost per square foot could be repurposed and optimized for affordability. Even policy changes regarding what new projects are permissible would go a long way. Are you making the argument that it's an economic/geographic impossibility to house more people for less money rather than an issue of political/social will?
    - rcme 3y ago
      I’m not saying it’s impossible to house the homeless. The OC was saying that the homeless is not housed because building houses for the homeless would lower real estate prices. I was just pointing out that it’s likely the opposite would happen: real estate prices would go up. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Think about it like this: housing the homeless is a subsidy. Subsidies increase demand.

jrowen 3y ago

Interesting points. Are there more effective programs elsewhere that build more hospitable/restorative spaces? Put another way, are there organizations doing "the right thing" based on the most current research? Having lived and worked near a lot of homeless people it's fascinated me for years but aside from volunteering a few times have not delved too deeply into the issue. Anecdotally, much of the "disturbance" created by the homeless seems to stem from a small number of individuals that many would describe as "too far gone." Is that a fair take and is there an effective solution to that? What is a reasonable estimate for the percentage of homeless that more or less prefer living peacefully on the street as long as they can get by? Is this a segment to be specifically facilitated, are there efforts to do so?

jdjsbaosbs 3y ago

> shelters are not homes > Solution to homelessness is not mental health services > Solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless... I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes. How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property and give it to people without homes? We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Also where should these homes be? Should they all be in urban areas like SF or perhaps in smaller cities/towns where the homes are cheaper? Which neighborhoods should these homes be in? I don't know what the solution to homelessness is, but this doesn't seem like a viable solution.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 3y ago
> I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes. I didn't say we should stop spending on those things, I said that spending money on those things does not solve homelessness. > We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. Notably, in places where this has been tried, the effectiveness of giving people homes is such that it's cheaper to give them homes than to do what we're doing. > What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. If your criticism is that I didn't draft a detailed legislation in a Hacker News post: that's the normal way that people write Hacker News posts. These are obviously not unanswerable questions as you are presenting them to be, but there would need to be some work to figure out what good answers are. Obviously. > Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? Surely you could come up with a solution to this problem if you were trying to solve it instead of argue against helping homeless people. A higher minimum wage, perhaps? Better aid for people in lower income brackets? > What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? Bro, your moral compass is broken. This isn't difficult--you're just making up absurd problems. If a person is homeless and they don't qualify, the qualifications are wrong. That's obvious, and the only reason it's not obvious to you is that your goals are about maintaining a fundamentally broken system rather than creating a society that actually cares for its citizens. > If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Given we demonstrably have billionaires "working" for money far beyond the ability to spend the money they make, I'm not sure why you suddenly think that greed stops at "I have a place to live" when it's convenient for your argument. > How does that work in reality? How does what we're doing work in reality? (It doesn't).

phendrenad2 3y ago

You didn't go into depth enough about why shelters are bad. They're not even a mild alleviation to living on the street, they're actually worse. There are homeless criminals who go to shelters just to steal from other homeless. Many homeless become addicted in shelters. We spent $17b making the lives of the homeless worse.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I don't think homes will help on their own. A more comprehensive system is needed. You get a place to stay and a living wage, even for doing absolutely nothing. Because otherwise, how are you going to recover? The second part that I think is really important is that we should look at this large country and do these things in places where there is space. Once can easily imagine a stretch of land north of Palmdale, CA where we can build hundreds of cheap houses connected to a couple of warehouses where we can treat people and where we can provide some sort of busywork for them. And yes, we'd be overpaying them. That's fine. But I think it's unreasonable for Los Angeles to try and get housing in this overheated market. It doesn't make sense, you're paying so much for so little.

kerkeslager 3y ago
I'm mostly on board with what you're saying, but I'm not sure why the busywork component is necessary. If the concern is that they'll be bored if unoccupied, there are other activities that are more therapeutic. If the concern is that they won't be able to build self-esteem without a sense of purpose, then having them do purposeless work is just trying to "trick" them into feeling self-esteem, and most people won't be fooled. I suspect the underlying thing here is a fundamental problem in our society, which is that we believe people only have worth if they can provide some sort of tangible resources or service through work, and that's fundamentally wrong. First off, the richest and most valued people in our society don't work and aren't providing value, they just profit off of other people's work. And looking at the arc of technological progress, there has been less and less need for human labor--at some point human labor will be unnecessary as the machines are able to operate themselves. At that point, I hope we aren't forcing everyone to perform busy work so we can justify letting those who own the machines live in lavish excess while everyone else lives in squalor; I'd hope we would all benefit from technology and be able to live lives of leisure.

jrowen 3y ago

In thinking more about this, I'm starting to feel like developing solutions specifically for the most mentally ill/unstable individuals is important. 1) They're a danger to everyone including other homeless. 2) They have an outsize impact on people's frustration with and perception of homeless people. Walking down the street and worrying about being accosted by the guy yelling at himself is a powerfully bad experience. Walking by a couple guys in tents or sleeping bags may not be everyone's cup of tea but it's not going to emotionally scar anyone. 3) This segment is the hardest for us to confront on a human level, we want to believe in rehabilitation, that we can help, so the resources (shelters/homes) are designed for the most capable of homeless, kind of ignoring the elephant in the room. 4) Have there been mental health hospitals made specifically for the homeless? It seems that the most mentally ill of them basically need intensive care to even have a shot at some degree of rehabilitation.* Unlike a shelter with services this would be involuntary and they would not be able to leave until meeting some criteria. May be a little draconian but it beats constant interactions with police and going in and out of jail. 5) A lot of the "regular" homeless people I encounter don't really seem that interested in working their way towards a job and a house. They seem fairly content with their lifestyle. With the most viscerally troubling aspect of homelessness being mitigated, maybe we can push more toward normalization: sanction the tent city, provide some light services/development, give them a bit of dignity and the peace of mind of not being a criminal. Seems a lot cheaper and more effective than building shelters or houses and relocating etc. People would probably hang out/sleep in the street/sidewalk less, and those that do could be ushered to the acceptable area instead of the farcical "you can't be here...or anywhere, technically, but just move somewhere else for now." Does this make any sense? Has stuff like this been tried? * In general I think this is one of the big issues with homelessness - a lot of them need care more than anything else. As in someone literally holding their hand every day, preventing them from regressing to their habits, and (with infinite patience) constantly reassuring and rebuilding their psyche, until their brain is sufficiently rewired (a timespan measured in years). The problem is that the number of people that could use this kind of care is far greater the number of people that are willing/able to provide it, but developing programs around that could be an effective use of the funding.

kerkeslager 3y ago
No, it doesn't make sense, and yes, most of this has been tried. 1. The vast majority aren't. The few that are, aren't going to be fixed by mental health services, because as I said, mental health services are totally ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of being homeless. And the fact that you said "including other homeless" doesn't fix the fact that your #1 concern is that homeless people are dangerous, not that homeless people are suffering. 2. Again, your concern is that someone will be traumatized by hearing someone talk to them in a way that they don't like, rather than that someone will be traumatized by being homeless? 3. Everyone knows that homeless people are mentally ill and is happy to talk about it: that's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that they are mentally ill because we as a society are unwilling to give them the only help that is effective: homes. 4. The results of forcibly imprisoning people are predictably bad. I'm not aware of any forcible treatment programs for the homeless, but this has never worked for anything else and I'm not sure why you'd think it would work for this. It again sounds a lot more like you're trying to help people who are scared of homeless people, rather than help homeless people. Why on earth would you think this would work? What, you imprison someone for 6 months or a year and force them to act "normal" in a situation that's not normal, then throw them back on the street and somehow they'll be able to cope with being homeless long enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? 5. Alternative hypothesis: the homeless people you encounter aren't interested in the help you're offering because the help you're offering is of the flavor you've proposed in this post, i.e., not help. * You seem absurdly confident that homeless people don't need what literally everyone else by definition has: a home. Why? What habit do you think you'll be able to build in them that will overcome lack of privacy or inability to keep their possessions safe? Why are the funds even a concern here when we have people so rich that one of them could literally build homes for every homeless person in the US and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world? We have enough resources to house the homeless right now, but we will never have enough resources to satisfy rich people's greed.