> The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option.
California isn't doing nothing.
They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working.
If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.
Then there's also the Williston / North Dakota oil boom model. I met tons of homeless people out there (I was one of them), many of which whom solved it through "one neat trick" of doing something like hitchiking to the oil fields, or to Seattle where literally anyone can get hired to work on a fish processing boat or facility and they give you "free" room and board and then ~$10k to go home with.
That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.
So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.
But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
> That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
> After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The funding for the original institutions came from the Community Mental Health Act (CMHCA).
The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.
And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.
The emptying of institutions in California happened long before that, in the late 60s and through the 70s; it became very hard to commit anyone, which justified further cuts.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
In SF they _do_ provide housing to homeless people. The homeless people, largely addicted to illegal drugs, use the housing to store most their possessions and occasionally come in to change clothes and bathe, but continue living in tents, or otherwise existing strung out on the sidewalks.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
Also consider shelters generally banned weapons and are dens of communicable disease and bed bugs (I'm horribly allergic to them so I'll never step inside a shelter).
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
> But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.
The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.
The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
Hah, yes. In Australia when I was growing up there was a program called Work for the Dole (Unemployment) after you had been unemployed for a while. During the dotcom era, that was me. There was one program that was tech and web development skills. I went to a church twice a week (the organization running the program wasn't the church, they just rented rooms), and we poked at shitty old computers while I tried to help the staff figure out how to get Dreamweaver running on them (I knew more than the staff) in a way that was basically trying not to break the licensing - since they'd only bought one copy for the entire classroom. I knew more than the staff, the computers were decrepit, etc., and we were stuffed in the back room of a church.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.
Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)
I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
>Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.
[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/
Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.
SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.
That seems like an unfair metric. Any program that helps homeless people significantly more than anywhere else in the USA is going to become the new capital of homeless people and their population will explode. It doesn't mean the people helped are worse off.
Right, but the taxpayers in that city are worse off. That's why any solutions need to be driven at least at the county level and preferably at the state level. Leaving it to individual cities creates all sorts of perverse incentives. (SF is somewhat unique in that they are their own county so for that area specifically, shifting programs from the city to county level wouldn't change anything.)
Taxpayers are pretty much always going to be worse off helping the homeless. Only a small fraction of the chronically homeless will become tax positive citizens in their lifetime.
Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.
My point is that it's a lot easier to share the tax burden at the state level rather than in individual cities.
I mean, San Francisco could spend that money housing their homeless in random cities spread around the country - investing in these cities and avoiding encouraging influx to a single spot... Possibly even cities with jobs, and funding corresponding service and construction jobs in these cities. Except of course for the NIMBY problem - I laugh at how that would be received in the cities I know about.
>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.
IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.
Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
This is a popular myth but it’s not true. The reality is a lot more complicated[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
>The reality is a lot more complicated
Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.
But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.
That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.
> But that doesn't make it a "myth."
It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.
>It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens:
And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.
While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.
Out of sight, out of mind and all that.
> there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems
I'll point out that this is a myth as many time as you repeat it until you cite some source to back up the assertion.
And what I cited is not my analysis, it's a reputable publication that did actual investigative journalism.