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The strategy is called “housing first” and has been proven to work in Finland: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-so

• x0x0 3y ago
  What people do consider is that it's extraordinarily unfair for many people who struggle with housing costs -- imagine what eg SF-area rents do to a cook or cleaner earning even $50k annually -- if we're going to provide that for free to junkies. Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
  • felix_n 3y ago
    Are _you_ saying that it's unfair, or are you speaking for the working class?
    • meowtimemania 3y ago
      I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't on drugs. I just can't wrap my head around why we should reward people with free housing for being drug addicts. I have lots of sympathy for the drug-free homeless community. I think the drug addicted should be put in treatment programs or charged for possession of these drugs so that they can be treated in prison. I'm angry that we allow people to smoke fentanyl out in the open in SF. It's bad for everyone including those who are addicted.
      • kristofferR 3y ago
        A lot of homeless people, perhaps the majority, use drugs as a consequence of not having a place to live. Think about it, it's obviously much easier to use escapist drugs when you live on the streets. Not only do you want to escape, you are also surrounded by drugs and other misery. You are thinking about it the opposite way. In reality, you can't get people to stop using drugs while keeping them on the streets.
        • meowtimemania 3y ago
          I think there needs to be some kind of sobriety requirement. Maybe put them through rehab, and then give them housing after they leave rehab. I saw this tweet from the Y combinator ceo that says 25% of those in a permanent housing program in SF died. (I assume of overdose). Getting people housed shouldn’t be the priority, the priority is getting them drug free. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20 https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20
          • boucher 3y ago
            Do you know how effective rehab is for people who don’t go voluntarily? The unfortunate reality of drug addiction is that even for people who want out it’s very hard. For people who don’t, it’s quite a lot harder. If there was a magic pill that cured addiction I think we might make different policy choices, but given that there isn’t I don’t see how your plan can really work.
            • meowtimemania 3y ago
              There aren’t any good solutions to this problem. IMO we should enforce existing laws around the possession of illegal substances. These drugs are a total drain on society. What message are we sending when we allow people to smoke fentanyl on the bart with no consequences?
          • kristofferR 3y ago
            Read this article and I think you'll understand the issue better: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros... Just giving the homeless a moldy and bug infested tiny room without any additional help isn't going to help much. It's "housing first", not "housing only". I don't think you understand addiction and rehab, frankly. Getting people to stop using drugs is quite easy, just keep them away from it for a while. You can send anyone to prison or rehab, and they'll stop using drugs for a while. The hard part is getting people from restarting to use drugs once you let them free, and you can't even hope to do that successfully unless they are motivated themselves, which they won't be if they live on the street.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Why do the unhoused have to be housed in high cost SF? The nice thing about doing this as a country is that they can place people not in their highest cost cities.
    • bhhaskin 3y ago
      Unless you force people to relocate, they likely won't relocate themselves.
      • Alupis 3y ago
        They relocated to where they are though. A lot, or even most of the people living on the streets of SF are not from SF, or even California for the matter. They aren't "tech bros" down on their luck either... they're not failed entrepreneurs, or folks who just couldn't afford one too many rent payments. They're people who chose to be there for many reasons, including the friendly environment that tolerates their lifestyle.
    • ajmurmann 3y ago
      Right now these problems are being left to counties to figure out, just like mental health
• seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  In Finland, it is housing first with a live in social worker. Also, for many, they never get a job or anything like that (their mental illness or substance abuse problems are never cured), it’s just that it is cheaper for the Finnish government to house these people than not.
• shepardrtc 3y ago
  > why should they get it for free? They shouldn't get it for free. They should be required to be in recovery programs and have jobs. Create state or federal jobs for them if necessary.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    What jobs do you imagine these people will be compelled to do?
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Most homeless people are just normal people who dont have a home. They can pick up garbage or dig ditches or plant trees at the very least. Plenty of menial labor that needs to be done.
      • hotpotamus 3y ago
        And if they don't want to do this menial labor?
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • HDThoreaun 3y ago
          Options include: 1. send them to extremely cheap housing in bumfuck 2. jail 3. let them be homeless if thats what they want Imo most of the people who think this way are addicts or mentally ill and should be involuntarily committed, so my preferred option is 4. Rebuild the asylums and commit people(with heavy oversight) who are completely incapable of caring for themselves. Although this option is similar to 2
          • hotpotamus 3y ago
            Sounds pretty illiberal to me. Lately (due to the whole pandemic/vaccine controversies), I've begun to wonder what drugs the state can force individuals to take or not take, and increasingly it seems that individual freedom is the rule in the US at least.
• vondur 3y ago
  There are some housing near my house that was simply repurposed motels. Seems to work, I don't notice any people just hanging around. Seems to work better than the standard homeless shelters we have here, that are pretty restrictive and they force the homeless to leave during the day and return at night.
• meowtimemania 3y ago
  I like the idea, but I don't think a homeless person should be entitled to free housing in one of the most expensive real estate areas of the world. Why work full time at mcdonalds to pay rent when you could just be a drug addict with a free house? Maybe we could create free housing communities where real estate is a bit cheaper.
  • dv_dt 3y ago
    This idea of worrying about who gets what for free before actually solving the problem, is a major blocker in solving the homelessness problem. And not only do the homeless suffer for it, the people who have work or homes in the area suffer for the lack of pragmatism about it.
    • meowtimemania 3y ago
      I agree with you, I just feel like if I were working a minimum wage job busting my ass to pay rent to my landlord, I’d be deeply offended that you can be rewarded free housing essentially for being addicted to drugs.
      • p0pcult 3y ago
        [dead]
      • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
        I think culturally we need to get our heads on straight. There’s no reason for someone who is capable of work to be feeling offended that a sick person gets something they can earn. I’m not angry disabled people can get income just for being disabled: being disabled sucks ass! Similarly I wouldn’t envy a homeless/addicted person: being homeless rots your brain and being addicted is like being enslaved. I’m a free man and I’m happy with that. Yes I must work for my housing but I guarantee my quality of life is better than someone whose addiction drive them out onto the streets.
      • p_j_w 3y ago
        And yet, in spite of being offended by it, your life would actually be better for them getting free housing.
• deleted 3y ago
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• adeon 3y ago
  Around year 2009-2010, I worked in public sector in Helsinki in the real estate department. I worked the phone handling tenants calling and needing repairs. A large portion of the tenants were people from the homeless program. At the time I did not know this program was unusual. My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly, although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part, just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate building to the social workers in the homeless building they can then give out to new tenants. I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've seen here. I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's inhumane to make demands. I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in California. Housing is super expensive, and I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did. The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care. I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings, windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    > I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. My take on it (after living in SF for many years): 1. Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This is largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago, where people were put into horrible conditions in mental institutions. 2. I think a housing-first program would absolutely work, but it's politically infeasible. Most people would seemingly prefer to have homeless people all over the streets and sidewalks when the alternative is to give them free housing, because it's "not fair" to the people who've worked to pay for their own housing. 3. The option of busing/flying homeless people out of a high-cost city like SF and into a lower-cost region where their needs can be met is also politically fraught. There are (voluntary) programs that help homeless people travel to a place where they have family who can help them, though I don't think it's used as a solution as often as it could be. But the idea of forcibly moving homeless people to a random place or places where they have no connection or support network is considered inhumane and a violation of rights. I think #2 would be more acceptable to people if #3 could be used more, since presumably people could be housed in a location where housing is much cheaper. As much as I'm not super comfortable with the idea of just forcibly moving people to a different location, I think it overall can be better for the people involved, if it's done well. But that's the trick: can we actually ensure that the people relocated elsewhere will have their needs met, and will end up in clean, well-maintained housing? Beyond that, I think we need to get over our aversion toward requiring people to go into (and stay in) psychiatric care or drug rehab. This shouldn't be a requirement for receiving housing; it should happen concurrently with being housed, though a live-in rehab program is probably appropriate for many people, at least to start. But I think refusing treatment should just not be an option. And as a public health issue, and just an issue of keeping our spaces a nice, clean, safe place for everyone to live, ultimately I think we should make homelessness illegal, as long as we can provide a good alternative for every single person in that situation.
• acchow 3y ago
  On a national level, Housing First will help a lot. If California tried this, it would probably attract too many people to the state and run out of money.
• oh_sigh 3y ago
  They don't get it for free in Finland - your link says it is important that they are tenants, have a contract, and pay rent(possibly with housing assistance). Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc, and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will just enable the drug addiction types.
• delusional 3y ago
  > What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc. There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice. What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
  • travisjungroth 3y ago
    I think it’s harder for people to see it that way when there’s means testing. Also when you’re at the just-better-than free tier, but paying full price. I think that’s the nice thing about UBI. It’s a little different to rail against u employed people getting $1,000 a month when you’re also getting $1,000 a month.
    • mjevans 3y ago
      UBI won't answer the problem of RENT. The rent will always rise to pickup the new headroom until there is no longer headroom. All the profit will go to the rent seekers who leave nothing for anyone to get ahead.
      • Clubber 3y ago
        With UBI though, you can move to a much cheaper location and live there.
        • erik_seaberg 3y ago
          There seems to be a lot of housing going unused in declining job markets, and I hope UBI makes it feasible for people to use it more.
• jandrese 3y ago
  It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?" I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
  • zizee 3y ago
    Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Years ago, I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I've spent time homeless and read a lot, etc. There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states. It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both practically and because people are reluctant to hire you. Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal health coverage could help. There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't provide a robust social safety net.
      • kodah 3y ago
        > There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states. Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of wage growth compared to cost of living? Personally, I've started to think it's the latter, because it explains why upper middle class non-millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often rely on income rather than capital gains.
• chinchilla2020 3y ago
  > Proven to work in Finland Finland, a tiny baltic nation that has almost nothing in common with the USA.
  • HEmanZ 3y ago
    The Bay Area is about the same population as Finland. And it has a higher gdp per capita than Finland. I agree that we are working with more “technical debt” than Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won’t work. But strategically I don’t see a major difference.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      The Bay Area doesn't control immigration and cannot set its own monetary policy. Some problems need to be solved at the Federal level, but the Bay Area does not set Federal policy.
      • disgruntledphd2 3y ago
        Neither does Finland, the EU controls immigration from almost all of the surrounding countries, and the ECB controls monetary policy.
    • Amezarak 3y ago
      Population #s and GDP mean very little, and thinking we can move the needle on our favorite issues by looking at these needles is the source of a lot of problems. People think you can just spend more and more money on problems and fix them. There are things money cannot buy. And often, the processes behind the accumulation of the money are what contributed to the problem in the first place. As an example of just one contributing factor, population churn has an extremely negative impact across nearly the whole spectrum of social issues. What is the population churn in SF vs Finland?
• bobthepanda 3y ago
  There was a recent study that, like everything else with the homelessness problem, Housing First is most successful in places where housing is not ridiculously expensive to find, so the costs of implementation are low and housing units to place people in actually exist. The exact same things that burden the private housing sector in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning, neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) also restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the exact same laws.
• dangwhy 3y ago
  Why are all the lofty examples from countries that are hostile to refugees/immigrants like Scandinavian countries. Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.
  • patall 3y ago
    I think you are mistaken, though I do not know how. Scandinavian countries accept quite many immigrants. I.e Sweden in 2022: 3.6/1000, compared to US (2020!): 3/1000. Both sources from wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_S...
    • dangwhy 3y ago
      > I think you are mistaken, though I do not know how. see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36172283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36172283
  • OpieCunningham 3y ago
    The US accepted 22,645 refugees in 2022. Since 1990 the U.S. has accepted, on average, roughly 75,000 per year. In 2021, the US accepted 11,411 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 28,900 citizens), and Finland accepted 1,282 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 4,300 citizens). * https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugees-arriving-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugee... * https://www.worlddata.info/europe/finland/asylum.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/finland/asylum.php
    • dangwhy 3y ago
      Sorry my original number was slightly off. 2.76 border crossings in 2022 . I know there might be dups in this number but there are also crossings that are unaccounted for. There are also 1 million visa overstays/yr. This is on top of 1 million legal immigrants. Rough math is 3 million just for refugees ( ppl who cross the border apply for refugee status). All this not event accounting for hundreds thousands of work visas, millions of ppl living in usa in legal immigration queues, birthright tourism ect ect. But I think no one really has any idea what the actual number is. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-crossings-fiscal-year-2022-topped-276-million-breaking-rcna53517 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-... https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re... https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/chinese-national-pleads-guilty-running-birth-tourism-scheme-helped-aliens-give-birth-us https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/chinese-national-pleads...
• suzzer99 3y ago
  I think the biggest thing these programs fail to take into account is that a significant portion of San Francisco's homeless population is not from San Francisco. I've met kids on Haight Street who said they'd rather be homeless in SF than in an apartment in Cleveland. Are you housing all the homeless people who migrated to SF, and then keep housing all the new people who show up? The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
  • yks 3y ago
    In all fairness, homeless on Haight (and GG Park to a lesser extent) is a pretty specific category of people and I’d not extrapolate any statistics just from them.
    • conductr 3y ago
      It’s a subculture that attracts some people. The weather in California alone attracts people, especially transients, from places like Cleveland as well
• diogenescynic 3y ago
  It's not a housing problem, it's a drug and mental health problem. Many of the unhoused people you see could stay in shelters but don't--often the areas near shelters have the most camps near them. They simply don't want to follow any rules and now conditions are so accommodating that being outside in good weather is better than staying in a shelter with a curfew.
  • etchalon 3y ago
    Shelters are not widely known for being safe and accommodating places. Most people would chose camping over them.
• aeternum 3y ago
  The way 'housing first' has been implemented in SF is terrible. It is operated as a lottery helping a very tiny percentage of the homeless with a house/apt worth $1mil+. Those numbers will never solve the problem. If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent. The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process. https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-contracts-money-city-controller/ https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-con...
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Resettlement somewhere cheaper is the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, this requires relocation and doesn't scale. This is something the federal government should pay for and coordinate.
    • imtringued 3y ago
      It requires the relocation of businesses, not people.
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
    It's unfortunate that some of the smallest, most expensive, most mismanaged and ideological 7x7 mile real estate in the US is being used as the dumpster for humans in need of serious medical attention and societal support. SF can barely build a public toilet without it turning into a taxpayer trough feeding frenzy, so expecting it to be the Mecca of the homeless, the addicted and the downtrodden is comedic at best, and tragic at worst. Even if someone were to get back on their feet from addiction, SF is the last place where they would want to try to live, given the astronomical cost of everything, unless they're going to suddenly become senior ML engineers who can afford a downpayment on a $1M 500sqft cockroach shoebox. Most people with regular jobs can't afford to live in SF... think school teachers driving in every morning from Sacramento, and that's without fighting every day against a crippling meth addiction. There's practically infinite room in Bakersfield, Stockton, Lancaster, Fresno, housing is more affordable, the local governance more amenable, the cost of living night and day, but nobody in policy will ever be able to pull that off, so we'll be stuck with the current status quo that nobody is happy with.
• deleted 3y ago
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• 35997279 3y ago
  The other hesitation with “housing first” is that it’s associated with housing projects, aka ghettos. I’ve seen The Wire (2002-2008). Is what they’re going to build for the homeless going to be like that? Is it going to be where my kids play? Is it going to be where I walk my dog at night? It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
  • borski 3y ago
    I grew up benefiting from housing projects in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants who came here with no money. Was it amazing? No. But it wasn’t The Wire either, and one of the only reasons I was able to have any hope and eventual success is that my family had a roof over our heads.
• nelox 3y ago
  Helsinki is vastly different from San Francisco in many ways, which makes the comparison difficult. One obvious difference is the provision of universal healthcare in a coordinated and multidisciplinary approach, in order to care for the varying and often complex needs many homeless people require. Housing First is the merely the first step from which all other care follows. Unless San Francisco and society is prepared to provide something closer to what is delivered in Helsinki as a whole, then they may as well be pissing in the wind.
• BurningFrog 3y ago
  I imagine "housing first" works best when there is any housing to have. SF, like much of California, has refused to build housing for half a century, while the population has kept increasing. To house a homeless person there, someone else pretty much has to move out.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc. Sure, if the alternative is “do nothing.” But if you committed the mentally ill who are endangering themselves and others to mental institutions (not jail) then 90% of these problems go away.
• jonhohle 3y ago
  What happens when there is failure to launch? There are a lot of social programs. So many, in fact, it seems like an increasing number of people find it better to live off those than pursue traditional methods of earning income to support themselves. Among my extended in-laws, there are several groups gaming the welfare system, scamming family, and doing whatever they can to live on the dole and they become downright sinister when something threatens their benefits. They have no interest in becoming productive citizens. To the best of my knowledge, they are only parasites, provide no value to society or family, and their offspring are following in their footsteps. I’d be more than happy to cut people like that off, but how so without potentially harming those in need who want to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. Is it reasonable to expect adults to attempt to, minimally, live a life with neutral utility?
• AYBABTME 3y ago
  Solving the housing problem at a municipal, county or state level doesn't make any sense, without adding internal passport controls and internal visas. Housing is a national problem that needs to be handled by the federal. I have no problem using my Federal taxes to house the homeless. But I can't stand when my city tries to house people using my property taxes. It doesn't make any sense, they have no control over the inputs. It's creating an incentive at the national level to relocate to my city/county/state.
• anonygler 3y ago
  It doesn’t trigger me. But the idea that you can give them housing without judgement or constraints is absurd. Drug use is bad and is the overwhelming cause of their problems. The ones who succeed with this approach are also the ones not abusing drugs. In addition, I’m not convinced you need to buy them housing in the worlds most expensive region—and one that’s deeply permissive about drug use and theft.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  Kind of a tangent, but perhaps not. This clause: > has been proven to work in Finland could be parsed in 2 different ways. > (has been proven to work) in Finland or > has been proven to (work in Finland) Which has radically different meanings for applicability to the US.