3 ms·

This is one of those terrible, misleading statistics. Most of the "homelessness" budgets in large cities go towards preventing people from becoming unsheltered

This is one of those terrible, misleading statistics. Most of the "homelessness" budgets in large cities go towards preventing people from becoming unsheltered - i.e. on housing support and prevention. Two-thirds of San Francisco's homelessness budget is spent on housing and prevention: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/overview-previous-budgets/ https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/overview-previous-budgets... By definition, the best spent homelessness budget would be the one that resulted in zero people in shelters right?

dragonwriter 3y ago
> By definition, the best spent homelessness budget would be the one that resulted in zero people in shelters right? Well, no, otherwise “have no shelters” would be the cheapest optimal strategy.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Fundamentally, the denominator that we ought to be using is "number of people diverted from being unsheltered", not "number of people in temporary shelters". If a city spends $100M on homelessness and prevents 9,900 people from being unsheltered by housing them and only keeps 100 people in shelters, that looks like $1M per person on the bad metric. But that situation is obviously better than spending $100M on sheltering 1,000 people (leaving 9,000 on the streets) instead of providing housing support, albeit that the cost looks only like $100K per person that way.
  - dllthomas 3y ago
    I think the point was that there are ways to have nobody in shelters without it being a well spent budget, and practically we don't know that there is a way to spend realistic levels of funding such that no one is in shelters, so while it may be true of some ideal policy it might well not be true of the best real policy. I think it's a (marginal) nitpick over your wording, not intended as a defense of the metric you were criticizing, though of course dragonwriter can correct me on that if needed.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> By definition, the best spent homelessness budget would be the one that resulted in zero people in shelters right? Well, no, otherwise “have no shelters” would be the cheapest optimal strategy.

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Fundamentally, the denominator that we ought to be using is "number of people diverted from being unsheltered", not "number of people in temporary shelters". If a city spends $100M on homelessness and prevents 9,900 people from being unsheltered by housing them and only keeps 100 people in shelters, that looks like $1M per person on the bad metric. But that situation is obviously better than spending $100M on sheltering 1,000 people (leaving 9,000 on the streets) instead of providing housing support, albeit that the cost looks only like $100K per person that way.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  I think the point was that there are ways to have nobody in shelters without it being a well spent budget, and practically we don't know that there is a way to spend realistic levels of funding such that no one is in shelters, so while it may be true of some ideal policy it might well not be true of the best real policy. I think it's a (marginal) nitpick over your wording, not intended as a defense of the metric you were criticizing, though of course dragonwriter can correct me on that if needed.