I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?

I don’t have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue for fewer rules, not more. So I’d like to understand your point better.

What I am against is a totally unstructured program where they hand cash out knowing that 90% of it goes into an open air drug market that they make no attempt to shut down or control.

I’m not arguing for work requirements or time limits. People who are legitimately struggling will fall through the cracks. But I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance and be put on a pathway to supportive housing.

> I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work

Sorry if I'm missing something, but aren't these directly antithetical?

There definitely needs to be case workers or someone involved to help provide these people a path to recovery.

This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the homelessness problem.

Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work requirements is not simple. And I think you need some evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.

If access to money is not their actual impediment then you may be making their situation worse.

> I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?

You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?

> argue for fewer rules

Judging by living in the middle of this policy. The number of homeless has increased and the number of open air drug markets, prostitution, and suicides have increased with them. There is a concerted _lack_ of enforcement of rules. The homeless purchase RVs from scrap yards, move them onto the sides of streets, and live in them.

Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. And our response is just.. "here's $1000 and a legal carte blanche for anything short of murder."

It's not working.

One of the most under appreciated aspects of this is that the current policies actually hurt the homeless people who are stuck in a poverty trap and want to get out. They have to live daily with an ever increasing number of people who are allowed to engage in dangerous and uncivil behaviour. There are parents and children on the streets who want nothing more than to get off them - but until that happens, their quality of life has been made considerably worse by the policies presently in place.

What if we apply your logic to your own scenario?

You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?

> You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?

I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the water will spit them out if you pay it.

And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make your problem worse. That $1000 might as well be considered a pile of drugs or booze.

When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they realized they were just getting pawned.

I jump in and help you to shore.

You immediately jump back in and start drowning again.

Someone else helps you to shore

You jump back in and start drowning again.

Eventually everyone who would help you wants some kind of evidence that this time you won't just jump back in before they help you.

You drown.

Are you saying they should have done more?

We've tried putting a "fence" around drugs, it doesn't work.

And we've decided that putting a "fence" around addicts (aka prison) is wrong.

So it seems like we really don't have options.

The real analogy would be that you have to consent to the would-be savior to verify you are actually drowning. Im not sure anyone drowing would think “no thanks ill take my chances”.

How do you pay to enforce all of this? Do jails have adequate space? Are there enough judges, courtrooms, and public defender's to handle this efficiently? Where should the children go?

"It's not working"

What are your suggestions for aiding people to be able to afford rent and sustaining themselves?

Well if you cant enforce it and jails don’t have adequate space shouldn’t you put more resources to those things? Or do you not actually think it should be enforced nor should people be put in jail?

I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing. However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely point to a study validating the effectiveness of it, because the reality of means-testing is that it: a) Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost efficient b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people who need help behind c) Tends to create poverty traps and weird distorting incentives.

I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the impact on society as a whole. This is a separate discussion.

In reality though, I think most people on both sides think of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one of two solutions to these issues: 1) Making it difficult for those who are unhoused. 2) Trying to improve the situation of those who are unhoused.

The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it with cities and towns busing their homeless to other places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the problem nationally become worse.

On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid on the core issue.

The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and unfortunately this is an area which California has struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the same time.

Like when world bank lend money to country that are bankrupted, they ask them to take the money for reform and try to improve their economy, same should happen here.

Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people.

For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.

There are plenty of homeless people who are in a poverty trap, as you describe, but I think it oversimplifies the situation to argue the arrow of causality only goes one direction for all homeless people.

I think over-complication is the issue in the states, which in turn makes a lot of these grants go to heads thinking about the issues rather than the actual issues.

I also think it is important to attribute issues where they are due: Mental issues is not a housing problem, it is a health care issue. Not being able to manage money is not a housing problem, it is a primary school problem. Etc.

With all respect for your previous life, it does sound like you needed some quality health care more than a parental system that handed out food stamps (in fear that the money otherwise would have gone to drugs).

SF is a ridiculously expensive city that people from across the US consider (who have homes even) consider themselves priced out of.

It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).

Constructing that suburb would create jobs. The infrastructure needed to maintain it would create jobs. And even if it remains a net cash drain, it'll still likely be cheaper than 17B a year while giving people actual homes with opportunities to work their way up and out

The problem is that many homeless people would genuinely rather live on the streets or in shelters in the city proper where they have easy access to the things they want, versus having a house provided elsewhere.

They want housing near their preferred begging spots and their dealers, basically.

To take an unpopular example: Iran

Iran provides food and shelter to all it's citizens, making sure everyone has their minimum needs met. They've combined this with strict laws against begging. If they see anyone begging on the street someone will come up to them and ask "Why are you begging? Do you have some basic need that's still unmet?"

Outcomes will range from: - Helping them with that need (if it's legitimate) - Directing them to getting some kind of job if they merely want more income (even if it's selling trivial knick knacks on the street) - Presumably there's penalties for repeat offenders

Source: Iranian.

I am not opposing that they are statistically related. But it is not OK to assume that people are drug addicts when they tell that they are homeless. That is normal human decency.

Families are the fastest growing homeless demographic.

Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy.

It gives you some useful tricks, though. E.g. if somebody complains about the chronically homeless addicts assaulting people downtown? Why, you just point out that X% of "the homeless" are actually just regular non-addicted people temporarily down on their luck, who just need a free hotel room for a couple weeks.

But ya, most people won’t notice, since they didn’t notice these people before.

But the subject isn't addicts, it's homeless people. Not all homeless people are addicts, and not all addicts are homeless.

Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because usually at the top of the list is "drugs".

There other services provided en-masse for homeless people with addiction problems but you can't force them to take advantage of them.

The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the recipients addiction the hope is to address a symptom and prevent people with addiction problems from committing crimes to fuel their habits.

Source?

Because this seems to be banded around in comments without anyone sourcing.

I dropped this actual source [1] in another comment, that measures 13% of unsheltered homeless as coming from out of state for LA.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...

That said, you don’t think even 1 in 9 people being out of staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see how you can migrate and live far more easily than in Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won’t increase? That there isn’t a negative psychic impact to homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the system having to live around many others who are content to collect their scrip?

I’m skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who both originate from within, and outside, California.

Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you are arguing with that imaginary person.

For example during the pandemic one week close to the election suddenly there were posters plastered all over the place for getting tested. I’m talking 100 on every block it was crazy. They doubled the pop up testing areas. People came to our door knocking and telling us to get tested multiple times.

Not a week later I see the NYTimes with a front page top headline “surging cases of Covid in San Francisco” with very scary looking data about the spike in cases.

I looked into it. The spike was entirely due to testing. The article didn’t mention it until the very end and only in the most purposefully vague way. CNN and all the others had similar articles.

This is one of so many cases (Lancet article comes to mind), I’m talking literally hundreds I’ve seen of totally misleading data or very sketchy data backing peoples preconceived priors. The replication crisis is no joke.

Honestly I believe what I see, and I believe first hand anecdotes more than most data.

Meanwhile a single sharp person who lives in a city and interacts with the right intersection of people will tell you closer to the truth than even the better quality studies or media outlets. To think otherwise is imo foolish.

Exactly what I expect from HN's crowd.

That you seemingly missed the caveat that I mentioned about “hard sciences” also not a good sign.

More likely you don’t want it to be true.

EDIT: I might be thinking of a different study, because going to that link shows that 65% were in LA county for 20 years supposedly: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that information. If they used county records, it's a very different trust paradigm than if they just asked.

It’s a very different situation than being homeless in cities with more typical seasonal weather patterns; I nearly lost a number of toes due to frostbite when I was homeless in Saint Louis during a major blizzard. San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.

Of course they don't. Living out of a tent on a street makes it extremely hard to get your life onto target for rejoining the economically healthy portion of society. I'm sure you know that. I don't know what you were trying to say.

As a long-time participant in the bay area rental housing market, $1000 is enough to rent a bedroom in many homes, but how would such a listing get onto apartments.com?

If you’re paying more than $1000 to share a bedroom, you’re getting ripped off.

Check Craigslist, that’s the main place people who are looking for randoms to rent a room will post:

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=1000&min_p...

Of course, most people would prefer to room with family or friends (especially if we’re talking about multiple people in the same room). That’s not an SF issue, it’s human nature. So a lot of roommate groups are going to be formed through word-of-mouth, or smaller community group chats/boards.

Check how long those apartments have been listed for, some of them have been listed for a year. If it's an actual competitive price it will get rented immediately.

There are shared housing groups on facebook that will reflect the situation more accurately.

They need treatment and in many cases it might need to be compelled to break the cycle. This then needs to be followed with integration programs (and jobs, schooling) that do not happen in the same area where they spent their time addicted.

Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada.

When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and that we should give them (the users and the NGOs) money and safe-supply drug and leave them alone on the street.

>In the City of Vancouver’s 2019 homeless count, based on those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.

Where is the data backing up your claim?

If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became homeless, which is the data to match the claim ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there").

[1] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...

If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you weren't financially stable to begin with.

EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them regardless of where they came from.

This might shock you, but the majority of people right now are not financially stable.

Where are you getting this from?

  but when you do the research

Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:

- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime

- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits

- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here

Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."

At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.

https://sfstandard.com/public-health/san-francisco-homeless-...

But I'm skeptical of those data, because:

1. The data are from folks with an agenda:

- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.

- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)

2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.

- tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)

- utility bill payments

- high school graduation (or even enrollment) records

- rent receipts or rental contracts

I'm not saying all of those are required. But if the data come from a biased source (like one whose existence or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are all from out of town), then it's hard to accept it when absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.

I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence. Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?

I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with addressing the problem of homelessness?

  If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California

This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I would encourage you to download and read the original homeless census report.

A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not really from SF, even if they technically become homeless while living in SF.

Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.

But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.

I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.

These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.

That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also have their own homeless issues. I don't think their municipal gov would be open to the province providing relocation resources to these people.

Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.

Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them exit first.

But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).

(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).

But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.

This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15% number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45% number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're measuring.

See e.g. http://allhomekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Updated-7.11...

Edit: not to mention that these studies are all surveys and this political issue is pretty well known, so there is a strong incentive to lie.

You'd want to see evidence of incredible effectiveness to be willing to engage in something like that, but the evidence just isn't there: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095539591...

> Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms. Given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.

Note that this systematic review looked at compulsory treatment methods besides just detox, but none of the results were that impressive.

Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.

I don't know if modern institutions could be better. However we know they failed in the past. If you want to propose them again, you need to provide some proof that they new ones will be better than the old.

Well, I'm glad someone is because everyone else seems to be worse off as a result

Fortunately mass incarceration and just doing nothing aren't the only two options.

This is underreported to a criminal degree.

Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the first place.

We couldn't keep a roof over the head of a schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or stipends available to renovate your own home to the security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike problematic foster children, there is no state agency that pretends to have your back in this endeavor. Meanwhile you're cohabitating with someone regularly insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and occasionally molesting your family members, which does wonders for their mental health. Normally your entire family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the Rules of Society about as well as the criminal population. So in failing to solve one problem, you create five more.

Even more fun in California, since they become tenants of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the savvy ones will shake you down when you try to [unlawfully] evict them.

This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which is the same argument that has been made to excuse criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle either group.

The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and vote for any politician that offers a solution. The politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves and their NGO/developer friends (more money for more housing!), while not actually addressing the problem of homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians who seek to keep them locked into their destructive lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are given de facto permission to continue harassing regular people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from shops, wander through working class neighborhoods screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians who profit from it.

The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking around and trying to reform local politics.

Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy. In general people tend to react very badly when their body autonomy is violated: the results are trauma, CPTSD, suicide. I suggest we try other solutions first, starting from a place of compassion, empathy and scientifically tested medical advice.

Like detox centers, which exist to minimize trauma, suicide, and CPTSD.

> Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy.

Giving an addict a steady supply of money often just kills them (like my sister). I consider that some sort of violation. As is, letting addicts do drugs might sort itself out [1]. I imagine 2022-2023 numbers will be very very depressing.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/image/drug-overdose-deaths-chart-0

It's easy to get someone to stop taking drugs. It's much harder to stop them from picking the addiction back up once you let them go.

Addiction is usually the result of other mental problems. It's a coping mechanism.

My least favorite part of this was the local media pretended this wasn't true. They pretended it vociferously despite this being such an obvious lie.

Previous discussions on HN suggest that the official stats are misleading and, for example, will count one as "local" if their last official street address was time in a local prison.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co...

By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless population "became homeless while living in SF."

Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10 years at the time of the census (the agency only has buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect the amount of time the person lived in SF before becoming homeless).

So, although they may have technically "become homeless while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years since they first got here, including time while homeless). Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25 when they first became homeless.

When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years).

It's probably even lower when you consider that the current episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only marginally housed when arriving).

Only 17% reported being in SF for less than a year, what are you talking about?

> as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years

ahahaha oh okay you are insane.

Oh, looks like you forgot to add the 28% who were already experiencing homelessness when they arrived in SF. I’m sure that’s just an honest mistake.

> ahahaha oh okay you are insane.

So you believe that a homeless person who has lived in SF for 13 months, total, at the time they were surveyed is “from SF”? I’m not the one who created the reporting buckets.

I’m happy to change my mind given new data, but a person who has lived in a city for 1-10 years is not “from” that city. Maybe you should ask SF’s homeless census to report in more gradual buckets.

I visited the Bay Area a number of times and only met one person who was born locally. "Not even Americans!" in many cases.

Take in consideration that homeless folks are under no obligation to tell the truth when surveyed or questioned and are generally aware that "migration of homeless into certain areas" is a hot-button issue (these folks are homeless, not stupid)... and we have a recipe for the demographics of homeless populations in these 'desirable' areas being misreported and the percent of out-of-region homeless being under-reported as a rule.

Homeless folks definitely migrate to places that are more tolerant of homelessness and are all around "better" places to be homeless. SF, LA, Seattle, etc. are good places to be homeless. Boulder, CO is a good place to be homeless; they even put folks up in hotels in the winter for free when it is too cold outside.

Some people moved to these regions before being homeless, but they moved here for easy access to drugs and the overall drug climate (often not arrested or prosecuted for possession of hard drugs and pot is legal). This is sort of 'pre-homelessness'... their drug addiction was practically guaranteeing they would become homeless eventually.

BTW: Governments paying to bus their homeless people somewhere else so "it's not their problem" should be illegal unless tacitly agreement upon by the two regional/municipal governments. This practice is disgusting.

Let's not pretend society really wants to hug these people or employers want to hire them.

If you look up the amount spent per homeless person by SF on homeless, you'll wonder how it is possible that they're giving ONLY $1000 per month.