11 ms·

>$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness" Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe

>$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness" Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.

fragmede 3y ago
That sounds low. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out#:~:text=Since%202016%2C%20the%20number%20of,12%20times%20the%20national%20average https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-.... says $57k per person.
johnloeber 3y ago
It's actually more than twice as high haha $57K, 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-...
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Surely it would be just as effective to pay the homeless that money directly!
  - mynameishere 3y ago
    If you are trying to expand the number of homeless, then it would work even better.
  - opyate 3y ago
    It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
      Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it definitely would be that easy for most of the situational homeless. It would also help to prevent others from falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole. Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental health issues, motivates drug use, etc. Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.
      - candiodari 3y ago
        The problem is what San Francisco already experiences: it will attract more homeless from elsewhere for 2 reasons, one bad, one horrible 1) homeless will want this, and move by themselves 2) other state and city governments will dump homeless on San Francisco as a cheap way to "solve" the problem in their city.
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    If today you give every homeless person in SF 50k, tomorrow we'll have even more homeless because tomorrow a new batch of homeless people will come to collect their 50k.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  If you just gave me 57K in cash, could I afford to live there? Take away the stigma of the homeless and ask, if any regular normal person, drop them in SF with 57K, can they live? Or would they become homeless too? Because it is expensive.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    The problem with those silly numbers represented by bad faith actors is they’re akin to counting your bugs at the end of the year, dividing those into your annual budget and claiming you spent $/bug. Think about what they’re claiming and how it would change if they were more successful - e.g. if by some breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the number of homeless people in half —- their cost/person would look much worse…
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    That 57k would provide a huge runway for people to get their footing. Say 5 months of expenses, where they can maintain their address, phone, shower regularly, have a safe place to keep food, etc. Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes? How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from your locker at the shelter for the second time that month?
lr4444lr 3y ago
It's more or less the same in NYC. DHS budget is about $2.2 billion to serve 90K people in shelters, and that doesn't count all of the service spending from agencies not directly responsible for housing and feeding them.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind away barely surviving when they could become homeless and get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for way more than just 90k people. Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    I think some studies have refuted this and found that most often if you house people they become productive. But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to figure it out or watch our civilization fail.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      > it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living. Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
bandrami 3y ago
It becomes a question of what you count as spending and who you count as homeless so it gets difficult to pin down something everyone will agree on. A couple of posters already linked the Hoover study but obviously not everybody is going to run with Hoover. San Francisco's annual budget includes (these are all approximate) $420m for permanent housing, $60m for immediate shelter, and $120m for homelessness prevention, so we're talking roughly $600m plus a large chunk of the $250m that's budgeted for mental health interventions. So we're talking close to a billion dollars a year out of a $14 billion city budget. The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000, about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of $27K. Obviously this has some problems, in that at least some of the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody who's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's spending. TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end. (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
- generic92034 3y ago
  > (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.) Could you please provide some links to those figures? The last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as shockingly high. But things might have changed. [1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522/umfrage/anzahl-der-obdachlosen-in-berlin/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522/umfra...

fragmede 3y ago

That sounds low. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out#:~:text=Since%202016%2C%20the%20number%20of,12%20times%20the%20national%20average https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-.... says $57k per person.

johnloeber 3y ago

It's actually more than twice as high haha $57K, 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-...

kwhitefoot 3y ago
Surely it would be just as effective to pay the homeless that money directly!
- mynameishere 3y ago
  If you are trying to expand the number of homeless, then it would work even better.
- opyate 3y ago
  It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it definitely would be that easy for most of the situational homeless. It would also help to prevent others from falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole. Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental health issues, motivates drug use, etc. Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.
    - candiodari 3y ago
      The problem is what San Francisco already experiences: it will attract more homeless from elsewhere for 2 reasons, one bad, one horrible 1) homeless will want this, and move by themselves 2) other state and city governments will dump homeless on San Francisco as a cheap way to "solve" the problem in their city.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  If today you give every homeless person in SF 50k, tomorrow we'll have even more homeless because tomorrow a new batch of homeless people will come to collect their 50k.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
If you just gave me 57K in cash, could I afford to live there? Take away the stigma of the homeless and ask, if any regular normal person, drop them in SF with 57K, can they live? Or would they become homeless too? Because it is expensive.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  The problem with those silly numbers represented by bad faith actors is they’re akin to counting your bugs at the end of the year, dividing those into your annual budget and claiming you spent $/bug. Think about what they’re claiming and how it would change if they were more successful - e.g. if by some breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the number of homeless people in half —- their cost/person would look much worse…
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  That 57k would provide a huge runway for people to get their footing. Say 5 months of expenses, where they can maintain their address, phone, shower regularly, have a safe place to keep food, etc. Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes? How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from your locker at the shelter for the second time that month?

lr4444lr 3y ago

It's more or less the same in NYC. DHS budget is about $2.2 billion to serve 90K people in shelters, and that doesn't count all of the service spending from agencies not directly responsible for housing and feeding them.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind away barely surviving when they could become homeless and get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for way more than just 90k people. Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  I think some studies have refuted this and found that most often if you house people they become productive. But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to figure it out or watch our civilization fail.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    > it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living. Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.

bandrami 3y ago

It becomes a question of what you count as spending and who you count as homeless so it gets difficult to pin down something everyone will agree on. A couple of posters already linked the Hoover study but obviously not everybody is going to run with Hoover. San Francisco's annual budget includes (these are all approximate) $420m for permanent housing, $60m for immediate shelter, and $120m for homelessness prevention, so we're talking roughly $600m plus a large chunk of the $250m that's budgeted for mental health interventions. So we're talking close to a billion dollars a year out of a $14 billion city budget. The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000, about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of $27K. Obviously this has some problems, in that at least some of the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody who's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's spending. TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end. (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)

generic92034 3y ago
> (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.) Could you please provide some links to those figures? The last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as shockingly high. But things might have changed. [1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522/umfrage/anzahl-der-obdachlosen-in-berlin/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522/umfra...