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Medicine Hat becomes the first city in Canada to eliminate homelessness

102 points by graeham 11y ago

beloch 11y ago
My first reaction when I started reading this was, "Yeah, but what do you do with the crazy people who prefer sleeping on the streets?". Their answer was to just keep picking them up and taking them to their new home, until they chose to live there. Medicine Hat is not a big place, but doing that 70 times in some cases showed commendable perseverance. I'd like to see this approach in other cities in Alberta, but there are some pretty big obstacles to overcome. Calgary, for example, presents the choice between very high property values in the core and remote suburbs that aren't very pedestrian friendly. Relocating someone from downtown to a likely site of affordable housing could mean a 30 minute drive. If most people they knew were downtown, this would cut them off pretty effectively, and that's a long way to take someone 70 times too! Perhaps situating affordable housing near a train station and giving residents free transit passes would help. There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. The security guards working those buildings sometimes let them sleep there (the result of kicking them out on some nights is likely death), but security guards aren't the most uniformly humane and caring bunch. Some of them treat the homeless very badly. Getting these people into housing and treating them with a modicum of dignity could really help their mental state improve. Hopefully Medicine Hat's program can prove that housing the homeless is an economically viable approach, even in bigger cities.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  In the end it seems to come down to housing as shelter vs housing as investment. And in this day and age, the investment wins...
- marktangotango 11y ago
  >> There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. Great perspective, thanks for this.
minikites 11y ago
> I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around. This sort of "crab mentality" makes even discussing things like basic income, minimum wage, or projects like this so difficult, let alone implementing them. People come to believe they deserve their position in life when so much of it is due to advantages/disadvantages outside their control: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsen... > The rich players are determined randomly by coin toss, the game rigged so they cannot lose. And yet, says Piff, despite their presumably liberal bent going in, [w]hen we asked them afterwards, how much do you feel like you deserved to win the game? The rich people felt entitled. They felt like they deserved to win the game. And that’s a really incredible insight into what the mind does to make sense of advantage or disadvantage. Successful people believe they deserve to be successful and they believe that unsuccessful people must have acted in a way to deserve it, because attributing your success and their destitution to factors outside anyone's control is scary and difficult.
- Red_Tarsius 11y ago
  I'm all for basic income and minimum wage, but I think the luck mindset is quite detrimental. It strips men of their own agency and fosters cynicism. > I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around. Unfortunately, he ends with However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense. Silly me, I thought the change of mind was about empathy.
  - scotty79 11y ago
    Empathy does not result in social change. Economy does.
    - seszett 11y ago
      Yes - I'm sure that's how slavery came to be abolished for example.
philh 11y ago
What happens when the homeless from other cities start making their way to Medicine Hat? I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
- minikites 11y ago
  Homeless people aren't as mobile as you think. When someone is homeless they depend on a very specific set of municipal services and it's a huge risk to move somewhere else and not have a way into those services or even a way to find out about them. To put it another way, why are there any homeless people in Canada or the northern USA at all when they could just move to Florida where it's warm?
  - mpdehaan2 11y ago
    While I like the concept of this article, I think there's enough mobility that this may occur. However, I'd much rather someone get a house than move to another city just to live in the street, so ultimately I'd hope more areas adopt something similar if they see this as effective. San Francisco and Portland both SEEM to have a problem with destination homelessness, in particular, Portland was known to have strong city services and may have led to that. Given, the job industry there is recovering from a major source of industry, so I could be massively wrong, but it seems like the case. Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Though I recently remember reading an article from the Slack CEO, where he justified taking a large investment round he didn't need because the VCs were not going to spend it on homelessness. Unfortunately we still incentize the wrong things in seeking profits. Obviously, we can't call a single case out, but in the end, there's enough funding here to completely fix it if people rallied together and the Medicine Town thing could probably be done at SF or Portland level scale. It would be crazy expensive, yes, but would also greatly improve those cities.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      > Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Isn't central SF - presumably the location that homeless people for various reasons prefer to be located in - so expensive that even software developers employed by these companies on salaries north of $100k per annum feel they're being priced out of it?
monk_e_boy 11y ago
I'd never heard of Medicine Hat before. What a strange name for a city!
- graeham 11y ago
  As many Western Canadian cities, it has Native origins [1]. The unusual part is that its an English translation, at least instead of an Anglicized spelling or pronunciation. Its a small city, probably about 6th in Alberta by population. Its probably most famous for sitting right on top of a lot of natural gas, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling as having "all hell for a basement" [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Hat#Name_origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Hat#Name_origins
  - goodcanadian 11y ago
    Some other place names based on translations: Moose Jaw, Battle River Some other place names based on anglicization: Athabasca, Waskatenau, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
    - tonyarkles 11y ago
      Awesome! I grew up in Moose Jaw and now live in Saskatoon! Not too often people talk about us!
- davidw 11y ago
  "The west" has all kinds of interesting names. There's a "Jumpoff Joe creek" in Oregon, in addition to a "whorehouse meadow", a town called Boring, and a Donner and Blitzen river. And Oregon doesn't even have particularly 'good' names compared to other places, since most of western Oregon was settled by people who wanted to do boring things like farming, raising families, building schools and churches, and trying to stay dry. So you get more pedestrian stuff like Eugene, Springfield (the real one!), Corvallis (look Ma, latin!), Salem, Portland, and so on.
- Blackthorn 11y ago
  There's also a song of the same name by Son Volt.
ohitsdom 11y ago
Really interesting program. Does it have any effect on the local real estate market? I would imagine it would have at least some impact on renting/purchasing prices.
- sospep 11y ago
  > Does it have any effect on the local real estate market? - a quick look at real estate sales/prices over the last 4 years from the local real estate board[1], doesnt look like its had any negative impacts period | # unit sales | avg $ 2014 - 1708 - 274,655 2013 - 1446 - 263,223 2012 - 1539 - 255,538 2011 - 1322 - 247,850 1] http://www.mhreb.ca/market_update http://www.mhreb.ca/market_update EDIT: formatting
  - ohitsdom 11y ago
    Good data, thanks. I'd bet the bigger impact would be on rental prices (which data would be harder to find). There aren't many details listed about the program in the article, so I wonder how they prevent lower-income people from just taking the free housing instead of paying for rent.
powertower 11y ago
> With money chipped in by the province, the city built many new homes. You can temporarily improve anything by getting an even larger entity or group to pay for it. The problem is this eventually runs into issues of scale.
- ColinDabritz 11y ago
  I don't see it. $100k per person costs drop to $20k per person costs, they should want to scale this as fast as they can. They may have had to invest a little up front, or redistribute some of the costs back to where the funding came from before, but it sounds like this scales spectacularly and is a huge win all around.
  - powertower 11y ago
    Estimates of exogenous costs, and the implied savings, are usually highly uncorrelated to any actual savings of costs. If this was as you claim, then an entire nation or larger region would not have to chip in to pay for a program of a small city. That small city would just simply balance its own books and ledgers - since they are saving 100K with a 20K investment!
    - ColinDabritz 11y ago
      Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure that I agree. This is more than just some people estimating off the cuff, there are many studies in the US, and more instances and evidence world wide. Fortunately it's an experiment that is being run, so we will be able to see more hard data in the coming years. http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/cost_of_homelessness http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/cost_of_homelessness http://usich.gov/usich_resources/research_and_evaluation/cost_effectiveness_studies http://usich.gov/usich_resources/research_and_evaluation/cos... http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/12/shaun-donovan/hud-secretary-says-homeless-person-costs-taxpayers/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/... The biggest costs are pretty concrete. They are 'after the fact' emergency services like emergency room hospital care (vs cheaper preventative care) and jail (instead of housing). It's clear that these costs are higher for the homeless than average, but that leaves the question of housing changing that for this specific group of people (e.g. maybe they are just inherently more likely to end up in an emergency room) which is a valid question. The evidence is that people with housing are more able to get the help they need earlier (such as preventative care), and are less likely to commit crimes out of desperation, because they have housing. This leads to a much lower rate of using these expensive services, leading to a clearly lower cost to provide housing vs concrete cost of emergency services. That's why I believe this approach is both humane and effective. This is why I believe housing first is better for everyone.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I think this is an excellent data point. The article quotes an economic cost of $20,000 vs $100,000 for giving them a home vs having someone homeless. Is there a writeup somewhere on the methodology for doing that calculation? San Francisco claims to have 7,500 homeless people so that would be $750M vs $150M. I'm pretty sure the city supervisors would go for a half billion annual reduction in their expenses.
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  Homeless people are very "epensive" for their society, because of the effects of that homelessness. They aren't as productive as they could be, they require a lot more medical attention, they tend to vandalize more, or even steal. I'm not saying they are bad people, it's just the situation nudges or forces them to "cost" more. Society also can't really choose not to pay the cost. If they break stuff, it may have to be replaced. If they commit a crime, they have to be housed in prison (which is expensive). And if they require urgent medical attention, doctors won't refuse not to help them even if they can't recuperate the cost... In San Francisco the situation is a bit different. Housing is more expensive, so 20K won't be enough, and homelessness in SF is a bit more of an economically issue, rather than a mainly psychological one. And even if SF could save money, they would have a hard time creating such a program, for various political reasons. Also it would mean investing tons of money up front, without the cost reductions being easily visible afterwards.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    It's also important to note that SF is already a destination for homeless people from other cities in the US. In some cases that's by choice; in others it's because the local authorities send them there simply to get rid of them (several noteworthy stories have come up just within the past few years). So it's quite likely that such a system would serve primarily to foist the cost of homelessness in other cities onto the citizens of SF, where, ironically, it's most expensive to address. If I were a citizen of SF, this would be my primary objection to such a plan. It's not clear how to prevent this kind of abuse in a fair manner. This aspect was not mentioned in the article. Perhaps Medicine Hat is viewed as a less desirable place to live than, say, Vancouver, and therefore this hasn't been an issue. It's also possible that the Canadian legal system is more effective at preventing this kind of inter-provincial abuse.
jkot 11y ago
Czech rep. had something similar for some time. There are two problems: One has to prove to be homeless. Have some distant relative or had income a few years ago? Too bad, not homeless. And some people will demolish their own house. It is expensive to buy firewood, floor and walls can be used instead. House gets eventually destroyed, owner become homeless, gets new house...
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  You'd have to have pretty crappy house and a very low income to make that trade-off even economically attractive. Let alone psychological. Most people prefer not taking any social benefits, even if it means losing out on money. Humans prefer to work for pay, rather than get paid for no work, within reason. So do most other species. Except cats.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  In my opinion these problems are very small compared to the root problem, and so they show that the system is working - they are exceptions that prove the rule. But we can easily improve this first iteration, for example: 1. Let's instead give everyone an untested basic income that covers usual living expenses. 2. Let's give people who are unable to buy firewood better {financial,medical,mental health,educational} support to buy what they need instead of waiting for them demolish something more valuable.
  - jedmeyers 11y ago
    > and so they show that the system is working - they are exceptions that prove the rule. What does this even mean? How do exceptions prove the rule?
    - learnstats2 11y ago
      From Wikipedia: "the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes that a general rule exists." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule The fact that the parent is complaining about a small number of exceptional cases proves that the system works well in the general case.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
Turns out, less social welfare is often more expensive for society. I hope that over time, the social sciences will get a better (data based) grip on what works and how beneficial it is, and thus more of these problems can get solved.
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  I think there are many unknowns that will be revealed through implementation. Yes, it is better and more cost effective when you only consider the homeless individuals. The net impact on greater society could be more positive or negative and is particularly sensitive to implementation details and the specific type of homelessness occurring. Britain is in the middle of a jobs miracle, attaining their highest employment levels in history. Cutting taxes on low income earners has increased the upside of joining the workforce. [1] In my city we have youth who refuse to work the available entry-level roles and prefer to beg downtown with signs requesting beer and weed. I imagine the lifestyle would become more popular if it came with free, opulent housing further reducing the incentive to work. [1]http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-jobs-record-is-miraculous-why-wont-they-talk-about-it/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-j... (third paragraph contains figures)
  - bayesianhorse 11y ago
    I think it is very short-sighted to assume that wages (or their taxation) affect the "decision" to join the workforce. It just doesn't work that way. Most people on welfare really don't get jobs paying above the welfare limit, so it can't be that they are refusing to work, get some extra money, and higher social status because the wages are so low. For that matter, most welfare agencies, and certainly the German one with which I am most familiar, won't let them refuse such a job...
    - abandonliberty 11y ago
      Hi, I don't fully understand this sentence: >Most people on welfare really don't get jobs paying above the welfare limit, so it can't be that they are refusing to work, get some extra money, and higher social status because the wages are so low. My best guess is that you may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of a welfare trap.[0] As for the German system of forcing welfare recipients to take work when offered, I'm not sure how it would apply to these free housing initiatives. Also I believe that if the system is appropriately structured the desired behavior should be naturally emergent rather than forced. How does the German welfare agency not allow people to refuse jobs? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
celias 11y ago
Reminds me of this Washington Post article about Pathways to Housing founder Sam Tsemberis http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...
j_baker 11y ago
I'm skeptical. I mean, it's not as though the idea of public housing is new, and it has been used in places far more liberal than the US who have not eliminated homelessness. My first question is "Where are they keeping all these people?" Previous attempts to just build enough housing for everyone[1] haven't turned out all that well, and they became cesspools of crime. Beyond that, are the conditions in Medicine Hat such that they can be replicated everywhere? Perhaps Medicine Hat just has an abundance of housing. And lastly, it doesn't seem clear to me that they actually have eliminated homelessness. Other news sources claim that they will eliminate homelessness "soon"[2] or that they have "almost" eliminated homelessness[3]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homelessness-end-2015_n_7280232.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homeles... [3] http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-almost-eliminated-homelessness-by-giving-homeless-people-the-keys-to-their-own-apartments http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...
asuffield 11y ago
It's kind of interesting that this is seen as a major achievement. To the best of my knowledge, under the standards set here (no more than 10 days on the street or in an emergency shelter), we've long had this in most of the UK and various other parts of Europe. It's almost true in London, modulo some people with mental health issues. Homeless people get picked up and moved into temporary housing about that quickly. Having everybody able to afford their own housing is a much harder problem - we're nowhere near that. But getting them into council-owned "temporary" housing? That problem's more or less solved. It's crowded, costs more than it should, and most families don't have enough space, and there's all sorts of things about the system which aren't very fair, but it's housing. (There's a guy who lives under a road bridge, not far from my flat. He's been there for years. He wants to live under that road bridge. He's obviously crazy, but he's not a danger to himself or others, and it turns out that it's not illegal for him to live there. So he's a +1 to the permanent homelessness statistics, but he's perfectly happy with this - the standard as written will never be achieved in London because of cases like this one.)

102 points by graeham 11y ago

My first reaction when I started reading this was, "Yeah, but what do you do with the crazy people who prefer sleeping on the streets?". Their answer was to just keep picking them up and taking them to their new home, until they chose to live there. Medicine Hat is not a big place, but doing that 70 times in some cases showed commendable perseverance. I'd like to see this approach in other cities in Alberta, but there are some pretty big obstacles to overcome. Calgary, for example, presents the choice between very high property values in the core and remote suburbs that aren't very pedestrian friendly. Relocating someone from downtown to a likely site of affordable housing could mean a 30 minute drive. If most people they knew were downtown, this would cut them off pretty effectively, and that's a long way to take someone 70 times too! Perhaps situating affordable housing near a train station and giving residents free transit passes would help. There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. The security guards working those buildings sometimes let them sleep there (the result of kicking them out on some nights is likely death), but security guards aren't the most uniformly humane and caring bunch. Some of them treat the homeless very badly. Getting these people into housing and treating them with a modicum of dignity could really help their mental state improve. Hopefully Medicine Hat's program can prove that housing the homeless is an economically viable approach, even in bigger cities.

digi_owl 11y ago
In the end it seems to come down to housing as shelter vs housing as investment. And in this day and age, the investment wins...
marktangotango 11y ago
>> There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. Great perspective, thanks for this.

minikites 11y ago

> I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around. This sort of "crab mentality" makes even discussing things like basic income, minimum wage, or projects like this so difficult, let alone implementing them. People come to believe they deserve their position in life when so much of it is due to advantages/disadvantages outside their control: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsen... > The rich players are determined randomly by coin toss, the game rigged so they cannot lose. And yet, says Piff, despite their presumably liberal bent going in, [w]hen we asked them afterwards, how much do you feel like you deserved to win the game? The rich people felt entitled. They felt like they deserved to win the game. And that’s a really incredible insight into what the mind does to make sense of advantage or disadvantage. Successful people believe they deserve to be successful and they believe that unsuccessful people must have acted in a way to deserve it, because attributing your success and their destitution to factors outside anyone's control is scary and difficult.

Red_Tarsius 11y ago
I'm all for basic income and minimum wage, but I think the luck mindset is quite detrimental. It strips men of their own agency and fosters cynicism. > I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around. Unfortunately, he ends with However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense. Silly me, I thought the change of mind was about empathy.
- scotty79 11y ago
  Empathy does not result in social change. Economy does.
  - seszett 11y ago
    Yes - I'm sure that's how slavery came to be abolished for example.

philh 11y ago

What happens when the homeless from other cities start making their way to Medicine Hat? I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.

minikites 11y ago
Homeless people aren't as mobile as you think. When someone is homeless they depend on a very specific set of municipal services and it's a huge risk to move somewhere else and not have a way into those services or even a way to find out about them. To put it another way, why are there any homeless people in Canada or the northern USA at all when they could just move to Florida where it's warm?
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  While I like the concept of this article, I think there's enough mobility that this may occur. However, I'd much rather someone get a house than move to another city just to live in the street, so ultimately I'd hope more areas adopt something similar if they see this as effective. San Francisco and Portland both SEEM to have a problem with destination homelessness, in particular, Portland was known to have strong city services and may have led to that. Given, the job industry there is recovering from a major source of industry, so I could be massively wrong, but it seems like the case. Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Though I recently remember reading an article from the Slack CEO, where he justified taking a large investment round he didn't need because the VCs were not going to spend it on homelessness. Unfortunately we still incentize the wrong things in seeking profits. Obviously, we can't call a single case out, but in the end, there's enough funding here to completely fix it if people rallied together and the Medicine Town thing could probably be done at SF or Portland level scale. It would be crazy expensive, yes, but would also greatly improve those cities.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    > Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Isn't central SF - presumably the location that homeless people for various reasons prefer to be located in - so expensive that even software developers employed by these companies on salaries north of $100k per annum feel they're being priced out of it?

monk_e_boy 11y ago

I'd never heard of Medicine Hat before. What a strange name for a city!

graeham 11y ago
As many Western Canadian cities, it has Native origins [1]. The unusual part is that its an English translation, at least instead of an Anglicized spelling or pronunciation. Its a small city, probably about 6th in Alberta by population. Its probably most famous for sitting right on top of a lot of natural gas, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling as having "all hell for a basement" [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Hat#Name_origins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Hat#Name_origins
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  Some other place names based on translations: Moose Jaw, Battle River Some other place names based on anglicization: Athabasca, Waskatenau, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
  - tonyarkles 11y ago
    Awesome! I grew up in Moose Jaw and now live in Saskatoon! Not too often people talk about us!
davidw 11y ago
"The west" has all kinds of interesting names. There's a "Jumpoff Joe creek" in Oregon, in addition to a "whorehouse meadow", a town called Boring, and a Donner and Blitzen river. And Oregon doesn't even have particularly 'good' names compared to other places, since most of western Oregon was settled by people who wanted to do boring things like farming, raising families, building schools and churches, and trying to stay dry. So you get more pedestrian stuff like Eugene, Springfield (the real one!), Corvallis (look Ma, latin!), Salem, Portland, and so on.
Blackthorn 11y ago
There's also a song of the same name by Son Volt.

ohitsdom 11y ago

Really interesting program. Does it have any effect on the local real estate market? I would imagine it would have at least some impact on renting/purchasing prices.

sospep 11y ago
> Does it have any effect on the local real estate market? - a quick look at real estate sales/prices over the last 4 years from the local real estate board[1], doesnt look like its had any negative impacts period | # unit sales | avg $ 2014 - 1708 - 274,655 2013 - 1446 - 263,223 2012 - 1539 - 255,538 2011 - 1322 - 247,850 1] http://www.mhreb.ca/market_update http://www.mhreb.ca/market_update EDIT: formatting
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  Good data, thanks. I'd bet the bigger impact would be on rental prices (which data would be harder to find). There aren't many details listed about the program in the article, so I wonder how they prevent lower-income people from just taking the free housing instead of paying for rent.

powertower 11y ago

> With money chipped in by the province, the city built many new homes. You can temporarily improve anything by getting an even larger entity or group to pay for it. The problem is this eventually runs into issues of scale.

ColinDabritz 11y ago
I don't see it. $100k per person costs drop to $20k per person costs, they should want to scale this as fast as they can. They may have had to invest a little up front, or redistribute some of the costs back to where the funding came from before, but it sounds like this scales spectacularly and is a huge win all around.
- powertower 11y ago
  Estimates of exogenous costs, and the implied savings, are usually highly uncorrelated to any actual savings of costs. If this was as you claim, then an entire nation or larger region would not have to chip in to pay for a program of a small city. That small city would just simply balance its own books and ledgers - since they are saving 100K with a 20K investment!
  - ColinDabritz 11y ago
    Thank you for sharing your perspective. I'm not sure that I agree. This is more than just some people estimating off the cuff, there are many studies in the US, and more instances and evidence world wide. Fortunately it's an experiment that is being run, so we will be able to see more hard data in the coming years. http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/cost_of_homelessness http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/cost_of_homelessness http://usich.gov/usich_resources/research_and_evaluation/cost_effectiveness_studies http://usich.gov/usich_resources/research_and_evaluation/cos... http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/12/shaun-donovan/hud-secretary-says-homeless-person-costs-taxpayers/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/... The biggest costs are pretty concrete. They are 'after the fact' emergency services like emergency room hospital care (vs cheaper preventative care) and jail (instead of housing). It's clear that these costs are higher for the homeless than average, but that leaves the question of housing changing that for this specific group of people (e.g. maybe they are just inherently more likely to end up in an emergency room) which is a valid question. The evidence is that people with housing are more able to get the help they need earlier (such as preventative care), and are less likely to commit crimes out of desperation, because they have housing. This leads to a much lower rate of using these expensive services, leading to a clearly lower cost to provide housing vs concrete cost of emergency services. That's why I believe this approach is both humane and effective. This is why I believe housing first is better for everyone.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I think this is an excellent data point. The article quotes an economic cost of $20,000 vs $100,000 for giving them a home vs having someone homeless. Is there a writeup somewhere on the methodology for doing that calculation? San Francisco claims to have 7,500 homeless people so that would be $750M vs $150M. I'm pretty sure the city supervisors would go for a half billion annual reduction in their expenses.

bayesianhorse 11y ago
Homeless people are very "epensive" for their society, because of the effects of that homelessness. They aren't as productive as they could be, they require a lot more medical attention, they tend to vandalize more, or even steal. I'm not saying they are bad people, it's just the situation nudges or forces them to "cost" more. Society also can't really choose not to pay the cost. If they break stuff, it may have to be replaced. If they commit a crime, they have to be housed in prison (which is expensive). And if they require urgent medical attention, doctors won't refuse not to help them even if they can't recuperate the cost... In San Francisco the situation is a bit different. Housing is more expensive, so 20K won't be enough, and homelessness in SF is a bit more of an economically issue, rather than a mainly psychological one. And even if SF could save money, they would have a hard time creating such a program, for various political reasons. Also it would mean investing tons of money up front, without the cost reductions being easily visible afterwards.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  It's also important to note that SF is already a destination for homeless people from other cities in the US. In some cases that's by choice; in others it's because the local authorities send them there simply to get rid of them (several noteworthy stories have come up just within the past few years). So it's quite likely that such a system would serve primarily to foist the cost of homelessness in other cities onto the citizens of SF, where, ironically, it's most expensive to address. If I were a citizen of SF, this would be my primary objection to such a plan. It's not clear how to prevent this kind of abuse in a fair manner. This aspect was not mentioned in the article. Perhaps Medicine Hat is viewed as a less desirable place to live than, say, Vancouver, and therefore this hasn't been an issue. It's also possible that the Canadian legal system is more effective at preventing this kind of inter-provincial abuse.

jkot 11y ago

Czech rep. had something similar for some time. There are two problems: One has to prove to be homeless. Have some distant relative or had income a few years ago? Too bad, not homeless. And some people will demolish their own house. It is expensive to buy firewood, floor and walls can be used instead. House gets eventually destroyed, owner become homeless, gets new house...

bayesianhorse 11y ago
You'd have to have pretty crappy house and a very low income to make that trade-off even economically attractive. Let alone psychological. Most people prefer not taking any social benefits, even if it means losing out on money. Humans prefer to work for pay, rather than get paid for no work, within reason. So do most other species. Except cats.
learnstats2 11y ago
In my opinion these problems are very small compared to the root problem, and so they show that the system is working - they are exceptions that prove the rule. But we can easily improve this first iteration, for example: 1. Let's instead give everyone an untested basic income that covers usual living expenses. 2. Let's give people who are unable to buy firewood better {financial,medical,mental health,educational} support to buy what they need instead of waiting for them demolish something more valuable.
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  > and so they show that the system is working - they are exceptions that prove the rule. What does this even mean? How do exceptions prove the rule?
  - learnstats2 11y ago
    From Wikipedia: "the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes that a general rule exists." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule The fact that the parent is complaining about a small number of exceptional cases proves that the system works well in the general case.

bayesianhorse 11y ago

Turns out, less social welfare is often more expensive for society. I hope that over time, the social sciences will get a better (data based) grip on what works and how beneficial it is, and thus more of these problems can get solved.

abandonliberty 11y ago
I think there are many unknowns that will be revealed through implementation. Yes, it is better and more cost effective when you only consider the homeless individuals. The net impact on greater society could be more positive or negative and is particularly sensitive to implementation details and the specific type of homelessness occurring. Britain is in the middle of a jobs miracle, attaining their highest employment levels in history. Cutting taxes on low income earners has increased the upside of joining the workforce. [1] In my city we have youth who refuse to work the available entry-level roles and prefer to beg downtown with signs requesting beer and weed. I imagine the lifestyle would become more popular if it came with free, opulent housing further reducing the incentive to work. [1]http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-jobs-record-is-miraculous-why-wont-they-talk-about-it/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-j... (third paragraph contains figures)
- bayesianhorse 11y ago
  I think it is very short-sighted to assume that wages (or their taxation) affect the "decision" to join the workforce. It just doesn't work that way. Most people on welfare really don't get jobs paying above the welfare limit, so it can't be that they are refusing to work, get some extra money, and higher social status because the wages are so low. For that matter, most welfare agencies, and certainly the German one with which I am most familiar, won't let them refuse such a job...
  - abandonliberty 11y ago
    Hi, I don't fully understand this sentence: >Most people on welfare really don't get jobs paying above the welfare limit, so it can't be that they are refusing to work, get some extra money, and higher social status because the wages are so low. My best guess is that you may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of a welfare trap.[0] As for the German system of forcing welfare recipients to take work when offered, I'm not sure how it would apply to these free housing initiatives. Also I believe that if the system is appropriately structured the desired behavior should be naturally emergent rather than forced. How does the German welfare agency not allow people to refuse jobs? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

celias 11y ago

Reminds me of this Washington Post article about Pathways to Housing founder Sam Tsemberis http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...

j_baker 11y ago

I'm skeptical. I mean, it's not as though the idea of public housing is new, and it has been used in places far more liberal than the US who have not eliminated homelessness. My first question is "Where are they keeping all these people?" Previous attempts to just build enough housing for everyone[1] haven't turned out all that well, and they became cesspools of crime. Beyond that, are the conditions in Medicine Hat such that they can be replicated everywhere? Perhaps Medicine Hat just has an abundance of housing. And lastly, it doesn't seem clear to me that they actually have eliminated homelessness. Other news sources claim that they will eliminate homelessness "soon"[2] or that they have "almost" eliminated homelessness[3]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homelessness-end-2015_n_7280232.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homeles... [3] http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-almost-eliminated-homelessness-by-giving-homeless-people-the-keys-to-their-own-apartments http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...

asuffield 11y ago

It's kind of interesting that this is seen as a major achievement. To the best of my knowledge, under the standards set here (no more than 10 days on the street or in an emergency shelter), we've long had this in most of the UK and various other parts of Europe. It's almost true in London, modulo some people with mental health issues. Homeless people get picked up and moved into temporary housing about that quickly. Having everybody able to afford their own housing is a much harder problem - we're nowhere near that. But getting them into council-owned "temporary" housing? That problem's more or less solved. It's crowded, costs more than it should, and most families don't have enough space, and there's all sorts of things about the system which aren't very fair, but it's housing. (There's a guy who lives under a road bridge, not far from my flat. He's been there for years. He wants to live under that road bridge. He's obviously crazy, but he's not a danger to himself or others, and it turns out that it's not illegal for him to live there. So he's a +1 to the permanent homelessness statistics, but he's perfectly happy with this - the standard as written will never be achieved in London because of cases like this one.)