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Why would they need to have free housing in SF? We can provide free housing say, a couple hous away. The problem with that is that many of them will have a soci

Why would they need to have free housing in SF? We can provide free housing say, a couple hous away. The problem with that is that many of them will have a social net in SF which they will need on their road to recovery, so we can just run school buses to and from SF/BART a couple times a day. I'm thinking of something like a cheaper, open-air mental institution with some privacy, and without people being stripped of their freedom as a rule, which would be a good guard against the abuse, and with a lower threshold such that people would be able to work for an income and to help run the facilities, and a high degree of separation between residents on the basis of stability and danger. As far as mentally ill outsiders, you can initially restrict it to people who have some sort of history in California, and anyways many mentally ill homeless people come to California even if just for the weather. Dealing with people who just want an appartment wouldn't be too difficult, on top of the psychiatric evaluation, you can charge for the apartments on basis of income - it would be free for homeless people, and for people making a decent SF wage, it would be more expensive than an appartment at a similar distance, with some kind of grace period for people who recently saw their income increase and were already living there. I strongly doubt that people would want to live in a village for people with extreme mental illness for a minor monetary advantage.

inglor_cz 2y ago
"on top of the psychiatric evaluation" This is precisely what Scott Alexander addresses in the article linked quite extensively. Things like psychiatric evaluation are, in fact, major barriers. That person has to attend some meeting at a given time, but they may not have a subway pass, they may lose their notes, or they may just be so confused by the disease that they forget / decide not to. You cannot expect genuinely mentally ill homeless people to turn up on time in front of some panel at X:00 in a certain location. Tasks like that sound easy to us normies. Not to people who are in throes of a mental disease and, on the top, don't have any money or place to call their own. Possibly not even a phone.
- sudosysgen 2y ago
  You can simply host them free of charge for a couple of days until the psychiatric evaluation. In fact, we already do this, in a holding cell, and involuntarily, or in a hospital, voluntarily. There is a very silly attitude towards progressive solutions to social problems where people act as if there are unsolved problems where there are none, and then exaggerate them to silly proportions : this is a prime example. In this case, there aren't. Scott Alexander's article is about involuntary commitment, and we are talking about voluntary institutionalization here, where the institute is specifically designed for people who aren't a threat to themselves or society (yet), as an implementation of a housing first strategy. Voluntary institutionalization has existed for a hundred years now. It exists. It works. There is no point arguing it couldn't work, it's already here. Everything has already been figured out about the intake process and logistics. The only difference is the institution itself, and there isn't really any argument that we have something better than a housing first solution with psychiatric support, which is the subtextual conclusion of the linked article to begin with.

inglor_cz 2y ago

"on top of the psychiatric evaluation" This is precisely what Scott Alexander addresses in the article linked quite extensively. Things like psychiatric evaluation are, in fact, major barriers. That person has to attend some meeting at a given time, but they may not have a subway pass, they may lose their notes, or they may just be so confused by the disease that they forget / decide not to. You cannot expect genuinely mentally ill homeless people to turn up on time in front of some panel at X:00 in a certain location. Tasks like that sound easy to us normies. Not to people who are in throes of a mental disease and, on the top, don't have any money or place to call their own. Possibly not even a phone.

sudosysgen 2y ago
You can simply host them free of charge for a couple of days until the psychiatric evaluation. In fact, we already do this, in a holding cell, and involuntarily, or in a hospital, voluntarily. There is a very silly attitude towards progressive solutions to social problems where people act as if there are unsolved problems where there are none, and then exaggerate them to silly proportions : this is a prime example. In this case, there aren't. Scott Alexander's article is about involuntary commitment, and we are talking about voluntary institutionalization here, where the institute is specifically designed for people who aren't a threat to themselves or society (yet), as an implementation of a housing first strategy. Voluntary institutionalization has existed for a hundred years now. It exists. It works. There is no point arguing it couldn't work, it's already here. Everything has already been figured out about the intake process and logistics. The only difference is the institution itself, and there isn't really any argument that we have something better than a housing first solution with psychiatric support, which is the subtextual conclusion of the linked article to begin with.