5 ms·

Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians ho

by pstuart 5mo ago

Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.

canjobear 5mo ago
Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
- fragmede 5mo ago
  $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time. If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
  - Dylan16807 5mo ago
    > $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed. And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it. > And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
- scythe 5mo ago
  Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless. The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London. The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
  - rgblambda 5mo ago
    The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
- jedimastert 5mo ago
  You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
  - AmazingEveryDay 5mo ago
    I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
    - jedimastert 5mo ago
      There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later. Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      Why are you singling out immigrants? The homeless in our metro area are very much domestically produced. But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
  - Tanoc 5mo ago
    Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more. This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
- loglog 5mo ago
  The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
next_xibalba 5mo ago
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
- antonvs 5mo ago
  Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality. The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
- pstuart 5mo ago
  SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc). And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing. There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-homeless-programs-have-in-common/ https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
  - next_xibalba 5mo ago
    > SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals. If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.” Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails. YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed. A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail. Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons. Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
SilverElfin 5mo ago
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.

by pstuart 5mo ago

Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.

canjobear 5mo ago

Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?

fragmede 5mo ago
$10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time. If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
- Dylan16807 5mo ago
  > $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore. But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed. And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it. > And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
scythe 5mo ago
Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless. The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London. The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
- rgblambda 5mo ago
  The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
jedimastert 5mo ago
You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
- AmazingEveryDay 5mo ago
  I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
  - jedimastert 5mo ago
    There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later. Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    Why are you singling out immigrants? The homeless in our metro area are very much domestically produced. But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
pocksuppet 5mo ago
how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
- Tanoc 5mo ago
  Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more. This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
loglog 5mo ago
The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.

next_xibalba 5mo ago

SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”

antonvs 5mo ago
Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality. The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
pstuart 5mo ago
SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc). And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing. There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-homeless-programs-have-in-common/ https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
- next_xibalba 5mo ago
  > SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police? I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals. If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.” Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails. YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed. A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail. Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons. Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.

SilverElfin 5mo ago

The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.