A confounding factor involved here is that many government strategies for dealing with the homeless are endless money pits without noticeable results. I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with their tax dollars going to that purpose if they didn't feel like nothing was actually happening from it.

The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area.

The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But that doesn't solve the actual problem.

Homelessness is a systemic problem that can only be meaningly addressed in a humane way by the federal government.

This is just provably false. Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

Utah is not an example that proves anything. It's a fairly unusual area when talking about this problem. Utah's entire population is less than Los Angeles.

The claim that 91% of Utah's homeless population was abated is somewhat suspicious, given the remaining 14k would mean they had a previous 155k+ - which outstrips the homeless count of most major cities (including Los Angeles). This is not as cut an dry as "make more housing" because that isn't demonstrated. Certainly not with numbers that are all over the place.

Why can't the Utah success be replicated elsewhere? There are no religion-specific aspects to the Utah plan.

Are you implying that atheists are incapable of compassion, generosity, or the need to help their fellow man?

From what I gather, the Mormon church has a very complex and well developed infrastructure for deciding who gets help, what kind of help they get, etc. This seems unlikely to be readily and easily replicable without the Mormon church. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in god. It has to do with social infrastructure.

A government agency could eventually build the social infrastructure (though they might make a mess of it). But building the consensus that we're going to solve this problem, even if it costs us a lot is... difficult. As you said, probably not reproduceable elsewhere.

I'm a non-Mormon living in Utah. I don't praise the Mormon Church very often. But on this I think they have done well, to have the desire and willpower to address the issue.

Though, to my mind, the willpower and desire is part and parcel of what I am talking about when I say social infrastructure. That sense of community and social responsibility etc is something we tend to see closely tied to religious groups and tend to not see to that degree for, say, government run social programs.

*former Latter-day Saint

>used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership

You mean, send people to the storehouse as part of the Bishopric? It's pretty rare for people to be given money. Food from the storehouses yes, work through Church-owned companies and help via job placement services yes.

At least around here, maybe it's different in SLC.

"Who can help bro/sis so and so" or in EQ "So and so is looking for part-time work if you know of any place" and being sent to the storehouse for food. A friend was told no financial assistance and that she should consider subletting one of the rooms in the house she rented, even though there were 3 bedrooms for her and 5 kids and then 'coincidentally' within a week after that she had family services in her house saying she had x days to get a functional refrigerator before her children would be taken (apparently that's a thing). People here will ask for help on the private FB group for the ward when they do occasionally need it.

I imagine you see more instances because you probably have a considerably larger ward. We don't even set up overflow most weeks and I'm fairly certain in 13 years I've had to share a pew less than 5 times for sacrament and even at tri-stake mid-singles firesides we have tons of empty pew space.

With regards to referring to the Mormon church as Mormon: I will use the common reference standard as it will likely be returned to in a few years. The whole recent re-labeling is useful internally but not my business externally.[0] Not my rodeo, not my clowns.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/08/17/us/m...

You can’t afford to live in San Francisco on a teacher’s salary. If it were possible for all homeless people to get housing in San Francisco, does that apply for all teachers, too? For everybody making minimum wage? There just isn’t enough housing in San Francisco to provide it to everyone with a low-paying job in the area, regardless of how it is paid for, regardless of whether you overthrow capitalism and institute an all wise dictator.

Either we need to build lots more housing in San Francisco, or house the homeless somewhere else, or accept a permanent homeless underclass in San Francisco.

Utah doesn't have a climate suited to living on the streets. When you're averaging just shy of 4 feet of snow a year and 3-4 months of freezing temps it's a lot different than say Seattle or San Francisco where the average low is above freezing all year.

#2 by far is bathroom access... followed by water and food. Anything beyond that feels too permanent for a healthy able bodied person.

The way people treat me when showered is night and day. And then going to places with opportunity/wealthy people and away from homeless populations is essential.

Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?

(I won't reply and debate your answer; I'm simply curious and looking to educate myself.)

Relocating to a place where you don't have a job makes you even more homeless.

Remember that a significant percentage of the homeless are also employed. Many full time. Some as developers.

It's easy to relocate to an unfamiliar place with no family or safety net if you have a job and savings. But if you're just going in the hopes that maybe there's a job, and maybe you'll find a place to live in that requires no deposit, and maybe there's a market for your skills in that place, you're just going to end up on the streets again.

Put another way, I want to know what someone who's actually going through this would say because the question is sarcastically asked so often but I rarely read replies from people who are actually in this situation.

1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere.

There are parts of the US where the only road through there is a highway and it is illegal to walk on it. If you leave on foot, you are trekking into territory you aren't familiar with where there may be no readily available bathrooms or eateries etc. Think about how awful it is to travel by car into unknown territory, be in need of a bathroom and have no idea how long until you find one. Then multiply that by at least 100.

You can also die of exposure or run into other seriously scary stuff when traveling by foot. People can wind up homeless with zero prior experience with camping, hiking, etc. Being suddenly without housing in no way guarantees that you are prepared for hiking long distances to go elsewhere.

2. It's vastly easier to find food, bathrooms, support etc in familiar territory.

Being destitute and homeless is scary and problematic enough in familiar territory. Being destitute and homeless in unfamiliar territory is just mind bogglingly more challenging.

3. It's hard to get a job elsewhere first before moving under the best of circumstances.

Going someplace new while homeless to then look for work looks about as fun as jumping off a cliff not knowing what will be at the bottom. Maybe it's a river and you will be okay. Maybe it's jagged rocks.

4. Some homeless people are in the city they have lived in their entire life. They would find it intimidating to go elsewhere under good circumstances. It's too much to contemplate while destitute.

5. Adjusting to a new city is hard under the best of circumstances. It's unthinkable for some homeless individuals who are not only destitute, they may also be physically or mentally ill.

6. The OP seems to have some friends and family helping out. Moving may mean losing what remains of their support network.

7. They can have ties to the local community that are a barrier to leaving, such as having a child with an estranged partner and leaving would mean not seeing their kid again, or they have a job or they are on probation and forbidden from leaving, as just a sampling of issues that can be a barrier to leaving.

I managed to pull off relocating to get back into housing someplace cheaper because I have portable unearned income, I intentionally sought to develop portable earned income on top of that, I'm a former military wife who is no stranger to moving around, and I spent like three years researching where I could go to try to put my life back together. And that's just some of the obvious factors I can list.

I try to encourage homeless people to move someplace cheaper if they can. I try to provide useful information to support such moves and support other solutions.

But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Suggesting it for someone who is destitute utterly strips them of their humanity and completely ignores that they are a complex person with more facets to their life than their income and it really just does not work. Doing that tends to just make problems worse.

(This comment is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.)

Some other points:

"Moving" without a car is not so simple. You can hitchhike, with the success of that depending on how you're able to present yourself and the culture of the local area. You can walk, but only so long as the nearest places are spaced in small distances, and if not you would need overnight gear. The weather is also a major factor here.

Knowing where to go is also another factor. Even for someone with a phone and internet it can be a challenge. First there's so many places. But how would you know that where you're going is any better than the place you're at? It represents a gamble that could result in you depleting already limited resources without any gain. Even if your current area is expensive at least you already know where the community food pantries are located, where and from who to get free/inexpensive clothing, good places to stealth camp... Moving to a completely new area puts you in a place of zero knowledge in exchange for only the possibility of finding work.

There is a hump you have to crest to acquire long-term housing. You need (depending on where you live) at least several hundred dollars to put in a security deposit. You need several hundred more to cover the next few months of rent. You need a job. You need to feel secure that you'll still have that job in a few months or at least have a replacement ready. You probably need a vehicle. You need for it to be dependable. You need to be presentable before being able to acquire that job. You might need references for either the job or apartment. You might need some sort of rental history.

Not to mention if you've been living on the edge for years it might have changed you. For some people it puts on them a character of supreme humbleness, for others it makes them very outwardly resentful against those who apparently have so much. Sometimes those changes are too visible to hide and in a way frames you to people living in normal and casual society as "other."

Getting over that hump when you have next to nothing is difficult.

Like the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers.

Economic necessity has forced me to do very difficult things in my life. That's what people do, because becoming a burden on your family and the rest of society is a failing in every way.

Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm.

Life is tough. It doesn't get less tough when you redistribute the pain to make it more levelled. It just makes it less fair, by severing the link between responsibility and consequences, while creating unsustainable dependencies that will turn out badly for everyone involved in the long run.

The amount of money that actually goes to homeless people is extremely low, and most of those meager funds are used to give them food and temporary shelter so they don't literally die outside. And even then, the amount of taxes that "low wage laborers" earn is slim. Why can't those with vast excessive wealth give some of it to services that can rehabilitate the homeless, or create unskilled or low skill jobs that pay enough to keep people indoors?

If a homeless addict is smoking crack outside, what he needs is a shelter that can rehabilitate him, get him off drugs and get him employed somewhere where he can make meaningful contributions and connections to his society. Services like these barely exist, and are in desperate need of the money that we for some reason insist on giving to the wealthiest mega billionaires who keep it in offshore accounts and refuse to give to the people they are directly responsible for putting on the streets via critically unsustainable low wages.

To assume that the homeless are homeless because of "responsibility and consequence" is to totally ignore any systemic circumstance outside of their control that may have led them to become homeless or jobless in the first place.

In a sense the vast majority of us are a drain on society at small and large. The people doing the work of growing food, maintaining and building infrastructure, providing medical care, pursuing scientific advancement are a small number. My sense is that most people living in developed countries are doing so on the backs of others. It's easy to point at homeless and say they need to "earn their way," but did we really "earn" that car or earn that house. Did you "earn" your vaccinations. In the sense that you purchased it, did you earn it. How much did sitting in an office or stacking bricks or breaking concrete go towards actually earning the invention of that piston engine or the discovery of the measles vaccine? How much does the effort of sitting in a cubicle translate to the effort of constructing a house or growing a garden.

Very little anyone possesses is individually earned. We're all profitting from centuries of technology and advancement we had no part in. The humane thing to do is share what we did not reap with people less advantaged.

So as long as there are societies there will always be people living on the fringes of those societies. There will always be elderly, babies, children, criminals, mentally ill, physically handicapped, low income earners, etc. Nonetheless those people are also apart of society. Supporting people on the fringe is an act society does to support itself.

There will still be aid to the poor, but it will be in the form of charity, which is more sensitive to those abusing the aid.

Ending all unconditional government safety nets will undoubtedly cause more suffering for the poor in the short run. But in the long run, it means fewer single women having childen that they need government aid to support (welfare is a major contributor to increasing rates of single parenthood), and who are far more likely to end up in poverty as adults.

It also means fewer people who are able-bodied becoming a drain on society from a life of irresponsibility (partying with their friends while living on welfare). Forcing a structure and discipline on these people's lives is in the interest of society, because it means they become contributors to the economy instead of a drain.

The long term effect of a more efficient economy is a substantially higher standard of living for all classes, including the poor.

There are countries in the world that have much lower levels of homelessness and drug-abuse, and much higher rates of economic growth, than the US. You're pretending there is no alternative to the current path except genocide (which you accuse me of supporting), and that's very disingenuous.

> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."

I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)

The fact that you're trying to compare disjointed people within a nation to a family where parents support their own children really shows the amount of non-voluntary collectivism you want to impose on society.

>>I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF?

I realize that not all homeless are loitering drug addicts, but they form a significant percentage of the chronically homeless, and a situation where no-strings-attached aid is provided to them at the expense of the taxpayer, while others make the sacrifices to be independent through back-breaking work, is unjust.

It's not just a matter of competence. It's also a matter of choice. Some people choose to take responsibility. Some don't.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-21/ending...

Key graf:

> About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them with a caseworker to see to their needs costs about $10,000 a year. That means for less than a billion dollars a year, chronic homelessness could be ended in the U.S. If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps.

$10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem.

The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather than try to solve the problem. Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this. Other activists would complain that they are gentrifying SF and kicking out all the poor people.

Basically anyone who tries to solve this problem politically can't win because there will be some activist that protests against it to make a name for themselves and it turns into a hotbed issue by the media.

And that's how it becomes an unsolvable problem. Activists with agendas.

Because conservatives destroyed mental health care in this country.

Not that it was ever good, but it used to exist, until it was systematically dismantled in the 1980s and all the patients were sent out to become … take a guess … that's right … our current chronic homeless population!

Start by (re)building an actual mental health care system if you want to go that route.

I'd also argue, that having feds in this business would even worsen the situation: now locals could be taken completely out of the loop for decisions like where to place shelters. Like, "oh you don't like shelter in this neighborhood? take a walk - it's a federal decision, live with it."

To start, Reagan gutted the mental health system so that people who need life-long mental health support were more or less dumped on the streets. It also meant people who could get jobs and have a normal life with some support began to end up on the streets when things broke wrong for them.

So bringing back mental health services would take a lot of stress off of police and hospitals and ultimately cost taxpayers much less and help many people. The negative is that there are no clear boundaries around who should be involuntarily admitted to a mental health facility. But having zero services clearly isn't a great solution.

Secondly, drug users are either criminalized (very expensive) or minimally-aided to avoid immediate problems (with things like clean needles and safe spaces). Detox can be expensive and require considerable long-term support on top of personal will. There really isn't a good solution to tackle this, but there are some obvious solutions. Like a voluntary detox program where at the end you are enrolled in the military for 2-4 years. That starts to get some "indentured servitude" vibes but it is hard to find a decent way to deal with such a difficult issue.

In a nutshell, the vast majority of our policies and programs related to housing are designed to support single family detached housing designed for a nuclear family or rentals that mirror that to a large degree. We created such systems practically overnight at the end of WW2. We have fleshed it out and tweaked it since then, but the underlying assumptions and mental models have remained largely the same. Meanwhile, reality has changed and what worked for the famines that became the parents of the Baby Boomers no longer really works, yet we aren't adapting.

(Source: I was specifically studying housing and housing policy and history in hopes of becoming an urban planner when life got in the way.)

When the majority of politicians or their partners own second homes, that ain't going to happen.

For one, who is going to build these properties for low-income people only? Costs will be almost the same, profits will be way less. So why would a developer bother?

In fact, the recent change to require a higher percentage of low income units in new structures has killed the pipeline for new building starts.

Even if it seems counterproductive to the goal of helping low income people, historically new building starts have always been aspirational. Which makes sense - everyone wants a new car, but if you have little money you are better off getting a reliable used car. It is exactly the same for housing. When someone moves into a new condo that opens up a unit (and lowers the price incrementally) for someone who has less to spend.

Would it make sense to force carmakers to build cheap cars that only low-income people are eligible to buy?

Why not deal with the problem by manipulating the supply side of the equation?

Remove the majority of zoning, and the free market will solve the housing problem quite quickly.

Sure houses will be up next to each other, and they'll be smaller, and the yards will cost even more than they do now, but housing will be affordable.

Sure, factories with toxic waste in residential neighborhoods are a great idea!

> Sure houses will be up next to each other

And we learned nothing from the massive urban fires othe 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries apparently.

All these onerous regulations you whinge about exist because thousands of people DIED from the conditions they outlaw.

Remove set backs, get rid of minimum yard requirements, loosen height restrictions.

The rest of the world has houses right next to each other, as do America's most prosperous cities.

Manhattan, the dense parts of SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.

The regulations about minimum grass and 4 foot of set back and no more than 1 or 2 stories, have nothing to do with fire regs and everything to do with long disproven ideas about suburban design that hark back to 1950s ideals.

Visit a modern dense city, Tokyo and London don't have massive fire outbreaks (sprinklers and modern fire codes still work even at density), but they do have an insane about of economic activity in the dense neighborhoods.

Want to solve the housing crisis and get people off the streets? Dump 50% more houses on to the market, heck have cities subsidize their construction if need be, and watch housing prices plummet. Watch mass transit become the life blood of a city, and watch entire new types of jobs become available. (People in NYC may be annoyed at bike messengers, but it is a job created by density!)

In this context, would you agree that rent control seems counterproductive unless we were to switch to a socialized economy overall?

> There is no capitalist solution to this problem.

I'm curious if others here would agree with this; I don't have a strong opinion yet.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

Sorry, but this is the worst possible solution. Source: basic economics.

Rent control is one of the most dangerous "solutions" to high housing costs people ever toss out. It would destroy the housing market and make it vastly more expensive than it is now.

> These results highlight that forcing landlords to provided insurance against rent increases leads to large losses to tenants

—The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco[1]

The study largely fins that, in addition to rent control causing the available supply to decrease, and tenant mobility/freedom to decrease, it largely harms new renters, and results in a wealth transfer to existing renters.

It does not solve the problem, and it does not on the whole benefit society.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24181.pdf

I mean, if it wasn't possible to exempt a building from the regulations, there wouldn't be an issue with rent control.

[1] https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20100610/BLOGS01/30610...

Even in that case though, what was the percentage of buildings burnt because of rent controls? if it was extremely low (as in less then 0.01%), then there is no real problem.

There was a photo-essay of the devastation (seriously, it looked like a war zone) posted on HN about a month ago. I can't find the link now, but if you Google "pictures of 1970s Bronx", the Image Search links give you a sense.

Is it like Vienna, where you go on a wait list?

Doesn't the latter make the former moot, or is this a limit on rent of spare rooms in owner-occupied housing?

I thought this too, but it turns out that despite San Francisco's relatively high expenditures on homeless, only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeless. (http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...)

  only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeles

A greater percentage of present-day homeless claim to have been housed in SF 10 years ago than the general non-homeless population!

I agree with this idea, but i was shocked to see that San Francisco is a net-exporter of homeless people. That really points to some other root cause.

So you can provide early childhood nutrition to kids, welfare to their mom, free education for the mom, free childcare, etc, to try to improve the outcomes for children raised in these households, but one of the adverse effects of that is that the economic disincentive for having a child as a single mother is massively reduced, resulting in more children being born into single-parent families. The conservatives were absolutely right about the long term effects of welfarism, as shown by 50 years of rapidly rising rates of single parenthood.

So is it that other cities are suddenly shipping over way more people, or is it a predominantly local problem caused by rapidly rising rent that can no longer be afforded?

We have cities where existing residents can no longer afford housing that are actively seeking to attract more business to move in, and with that create more competition for housing and higher population. You can't fix the results of housing cost inflation if you keep the upward pressure on the cost - you just will be spending more of your money chasing the upwardly-moving property prices your other policies are causing!

71% of San Francisco's homeless used to have homes in the city, it is likely a similar proportion elsewhere.

http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...

Cities act as a catchment for the rural areas around them: you can't really be homeless in Ellensburg or Aberdeen or Walla Walla (with no social services), but you can be homeless in Seattle or Spokane. A lot of kids on the street near UW in Seattle (aka ave rats) hail as far away as Montana. When I was working in downtown Seattle, many of the homeless that came around were Native Americans from various regions in the PNW.

And ya, people do wind up homeless after they move to the big city, but often for reasons back home (they lost their support network and couldn't stay solvent). Anyways, you can't fix the homeless problem in individual cities without also fixing it in the surrounding regions, or even the nation. People are mobile, they will be attracted to the best deal.

So are you suggesting we base our understanding of this problem on anecdotes?

The problem I have with that is that the anecdotes that you present are constructed to support the idea that there is nothing to be done, that we must simply accept that homelessness is too big a problem to be solved or even quantified. I refuse to accept that conclusion, and support efforts to understand the problem rationally.

http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisc...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...

> The records show that more than 8,000 clients listed their last ZIP code as 98104, which covers Pioneer Square and downtown. That’s about 25 percent of all clients who gave King County ZIP codes. Putnam says clients sometimes list ZIP codes for the shelters where they last stayed or the neighborhood where they’d been seeking services.

Ya, the data is really noisy.

And do you really think the big cities can solve this problem on their own without regional support? Its like saying they can solve healthcare on their own, or any other country-wide problem.

Absolutely agree with you here. I think regional, even national initiatives are the real way to tackle this. Cities, as you correctly point out, bear the brunt of homelessness' impact. I don't think they can solve this alone.

There is hope that states can act. California just passed a $4 billion bond for housing veterans[1]. I hope the political will can be carried nationally, but have little faith in the current administration. They've already acted negligently, putting people using the GI housing benefit at risk[2]. I hope they face real blowback from this, but it's only one in a litany of scandals and failures at that level.

1. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Housing_Pr...

2. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/17/668953517/computer-glitch-lea...

Does some homeless dude from Boise degrade Austin any more or less than some programmer from SF? Both are seeking what they think is a going to be a better life. Both are ever so slightly changing the character of their destination by showing up.

Because they are a drain on the local economy, often have mental and/or substance abuse issues, and live outside. Is that a real question? You can't honestly protray most homeless people as free spirits painting on the sidewalk and "living their best life".

Both are seeking what they think is a going to be a meal. Both are ever so slightly changing the character of their destination by showing up.

https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/

Homelessness budgets are money pits because our first line of defense is so often the ER where the patients can cost tens of thousands of dollars per day. The patients with serious mental health or substance abuse problems also have nowhere to go after the ER...so they get stuck there for many extra days/weeks because no one will take them. Do the math and each hospital visit can easily extend past $1 million and typically are at least in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

On the other hand if you look at social security as one way to reduce homelessness it’s vastly more expensive.

Two things are needed. One, attack the root cause. To remedial spending to beat back this problem that we're now faced with.

We need those things, because Downstream effects from all of this will be very very expensive.

To make an analogy, consider that hospitals dump millions of dollars, and physician hours into their trauma wards. Yet, so many of the patients in them keep dying!

Clearly, the rational thing to do is to declare that trauma treatment is a waste of time and money, and is not achieving meaningful results. We should cut physician hours, and re-allocate them to some other area of the hospital, that has a better survival rate. /s

Or, alternatively, consider all the efforts you put into testing and code reviewing your code - yet bugs still slip through to release. If all you do is count the number of bugs that make it to release, with no baseline, you may conclude that all that testing effort is not having noticeable results. We should shut down the Jenkins server, and just let any dev submit whatever we want, without any review.

The problem is that as long as you see homeless people in your city, you will think that there are no noticeable results to these programs. That the situation might be twice as bad if those programs weren't in place... Doesn't really cross the mind.

I think one of the reasons why we get very "every person for themselves" when the price tag comes up is it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle. Also it's hard to get data on who is the more representative group.

I think this is what's going to result in a rather massive upheaval in the next city council elections in Seattle. There seems to be a belief--right or wrong[0]--that "the vagrants are taking over, the community is sick of it, and our generosity is at an end." (In quotes because it's a characterization.) There has already been one candidate for council in district 6 (Ballard, Crown Hill, Northwest Seattle), who subsequently dropped out because of other political drama, that made his main plank that he was going to do nothing except push to roll back spending at every opportunity and get ordinances passed requiring the police to actively go after "vagrancy."

He didn't get very far, mostly because of the aforementioned drama, but that he got as much attention as he did is telling. I think if a more viable, or at least level-headed, candidate starts to challenge the district 6 incumbent (I'm picking on district 6 because a lot of the noise about this problem has been coming from there and 6 includes Aurora Ave N) on the basis of this belief that the problem is too far out of control and must be stopped with a big hammer, the divide between the two groups will become pretty stark. And if that challenger doesn't win, it'll be a pretty close race.

0 - I happen to think this belief is wrong.

At the end of the day, everything is political. Instead of shying away from it engage with it because it is the only way you'll change society.

In fact, the more harsh way to frame this is people need to understand whether they have an interest in politics does not change the fact others do.

And we all live with the product of those of us who do get involved politically.

Speak or be spoken for has real teeth when viewed through this lens.

Next is feeding the homeless, some cities limit how they can be fed.

We need to take a close look at these sorts of regulations as soon as possible. Just these two things could make a huge impact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the...

It only is if you view everything through a political lens. Science and psychology, for example, are not political.

Plus you can affect change without the political system. Starting with improving oneself. Then family members. Then local community. If enough people did that, that would be a societal change and maybe we wouldn't have such a crisis in the first place.

Science is extremely political. Ask any PI who's written a grant or published a paper before whether they think science is apolitical.

Could you clarify? Do you mean to say that these fields of study don't yield results that have political implications? Or that these fields are impervious to political influence because...well I don't know, they aren't performed by humans?

Facts are facts regardless.

That and there is an incredible shortage of reproductions and garbage publications that are difficult or impossible to replicate with the available information.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170411104516.h...

These point to soft sciences, so I suppose my point doesn't stand so much for things like climate change publications, or evolutionary biology.

Except now you'll just attract homeless folks from outside of your region. The city with the best homeless program will attract the most homeless folks--all paid for by that city's taxpayers.

This is why I maintain the only way to address the problem is at the federal levelm. They should at least be the ones who bankroll the whole operation. It shouldn't be the city's responsibility to fund the fix--homeless people can move anywhere in the country and it isn't fair for local taxpayers to foot the bill. Citizens country-wide should pay for a solution.

Sure, that doesn’t solve the problem of everyone who’s homeless in LA or SF, but then where do you draw a line on people’s preferences vs reasonable availability?

If a million new homeless people decide they would rather move to LA and not Kansas, should the federal government accommodate accordingly? What if then they say they’d really prefer Santa Monica to East LA? What if within Santa Monica most express the preference for proximity to the ocean and walking distance to downtown amenities?

Where does the federal government then draw a line on providing essential services vs catering to someone’s lifestyle preferences?

The solution sounds straightforward, the path to get there looks like a Gordian knot. How do you pay for it? How do you get that funding source to go along with your plans to pay for it? Etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

> In August 2007, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of chronically homeless individuals living on the streets or in shelters dropped by an unprecedented 30 percent, from 175,914 people in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007. This was credited in part to the "housing first" approach; Congress in 1999 directed that HUD spend 30% of its funding on the method.

The page is full of more success stories like that. If it's so impossible, why is it already being done all over the world?

> Studies in New York City and in Utah have shown that every homeless person housed in programs such as Housing First saves taxpayers $10,000 and $8,000 a year, respectively. A research study at University of Northern Carolina also reported that a housing project for the chronically homeless called Moore Place had saved the county $2.4 million.

Yet it "seems like a Gordion knot" because how would we pay for it... that's the answer, you don't pay, you save money. So if the problem is how some people feel about something, because they haven't informed themselves, then they should feel something else, problem solved.

But it's reality, not fantasy: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance-overview

You'll be diverting people away from the criminal justice system and away from involuntary mental health hospital stays. Those can be fantastically expensive, and not particularly useful.

> How do you get that funding source to go along with your plans to pay for it?

Yes, that's a problem that seems hard to fix.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-seatt...

You speak like this is something nobody's ever done before, but it's been done, repeatedly and often throughout the world and even in America.

But you can turn this around as well: just move "homelessness" to the list, and mark something else as fundamental:

>Dealing with everything else (mental health issues, homelessness, etc.) can be dealt with separately, and will be vastly easier without having the fundamental problem of drug addiction.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be a solution with adverse consequences and likely won't fix anything. I am for diversifying our housing stock in a way that better serves our needs, as I commented on at length elsewhere in this discussion. But this is a problem space I have studied, and I don't think this works, for a long list of reasons.

The population of the tent city in Santa Ana california was an unmitigated disaster for those who took the vouchers and residents. That did not work because the population of people living on the street in Southern California are doing it by choice (be it for the freedom to do drugs, mental illness or other defect). People who want help, generally don't get turned away in high income areas - every single church in the wealthiest areas, have a program and members willing to help those in need.

I'm not sure it is so different.

I mean it may be on the long term, but the first step of helping them is making sure they get a place to live. You're unlikely to solve any of their other problems effectively unless these people can have a start of a more regular life - and having a place to live is pretty much a condition for everything else.

It's interesting that you raise that point. I was technically "homeless" for about a year once, as I wasn't living in permanent accomodation, but rather in a backpackers hostel in my home country.

I was actually pretty happy with my living situation, and had no desire to move into permanent accomodation. It was also a massive advantage when I decided to quit my job and move countries, I didn't have any contracts to cancel or work my way out of. I simply handed in my notice, booked a flight, and 3 weeks later I was in a new country.

These days I'd be much more hard pressed to do that. I'm on a 1 year lease, I have a 2 year contract with my ISP, I have has gas bills, water bills, and power bills in my name, I own an entire house worth of furniture. It actually makes me a bit sad that I'm immobile, I enjoyed the freedom of the concept that I could pack up and leave at a moments notice (which I eventually did).