Helping the homeless in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Helping the homeless in San Francisco

blogs.atlassian.com

46 pointsgitdude29 comments

> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do.

Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.

Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data.

If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!")

Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it.

Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard.

A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?"

Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!

The only thing you are wrong about is the how fungible and fluid the issue is.

This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level.

I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.

(Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area.

My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.

Probably not to solve it, but maybe to improve on it.

Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient?

How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives?

Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people?

Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?

Re: Food waste.

My experience with food waste is that it is primarily an combination of liability, lack of incentives, and very slightly infrastructure/organization.

Businesses and individuals worry about the liability; what if I /give/ someone food (presumably in good faith) and then they turn on me and sue me for some form of payout. (Political, laws)

The incentives part, how can you provide incentive for someone to give away food that is still good, but nearing the end of being good, to those who need it in a timely manor so that it reaches those with need. How can you encourage the correct kind of food being donated? (Probably political arena taxes and tax credits to manage this; yes both, you have to punish undesired behavior too.)

The infrastructure largely exists in most places, but communicating that to the public (awareness) and making the public's interaction with that structure easy (here's the one area Tech could help; aside from raw funds) are the issues.

Yup, communication and facilitation are great places to start for a lot of these social challenges.

As for the rest: I'm aware of at least one very effective NGO in NYC whose mission is just such food distribution. The organization is called City Harvest, and I'm sure that a) it could use fresh new ideas and technical initiatives, and b) organizations in other cities could learn a lot by copying their model and learning how they handle the legal and logistical challenges.

but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.

Technology can be enormously useful in this space. I am homeless and I make money online in part by blogging, in part by doing freelance work.

You want to do some good in San Francisco in this space, let me suggest you start a San Francisco version of The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide -- listing important resources like where to get free food if you need it, as well as free electricity and wifi -- and then also give away free tablets to homeless people in the area.

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I used the internet to research my next city and moved from San Diego more than a year ago and my quality of life has been better ever since. My health is better, my income is trending up and if I can come up with $7.5 to $10k in the next few weeks, I am planning to buy a house.

Technology can do wonder to provide gig work, low cost access to information that is valuable on the street and help homeless people become digital nomads and start soling their own problems and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps -- instead of becoming trapped in shitty homeless programs that you treat you worse than an animal.

This is super inspiring, thank you for sharing this!

I desperately wish we would stop trying so hard to "help The Homeless" and start trying to make housing more affordable and neighborhoods more walkable so that ordinary people with ordinary jobs can walk to work and rent or buy housing that fits their budget. Then we don't have to have these bleeding heart bullshit displays of how fucking much people care when people mostly do not care and, instead, they just like having an excuse to massage their own ego and tell you how morally superior they are.

Stop treating poor people like pets you rescued and can now show off as proof of how compassionate you are. Just build a world that WORKS, for all people, not just the rich.

We need to build a world where people who are not "the tech elite" can afford to live in it without some kind of intervention program. Geez.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...

I feel like the best thing Bay Area tech companies could do to help with homelessness is to use their influence to fix zoning and transit.

Granted this is short of them getting involved in campaigning for things like universal health care, better mental health facilities, drug decriminaiation, and other such issues that are harder to touch. But the impact of lowering overall housing costs would help many. And the reduced housing costs would reduce the demand for stupidly high tech wages helping with the inequality in the Bay Area.

CEOs of these tech companies must live in bubbles to not see the threat that Bay Area housing costs have to their business.

I was at the meetup they held a few weeks ago at Atlassian; probably the most interesting bit to me (as a 10+ year SF resident) was Jeff Kositsky discussion about some of the structural work the city was doing to address the issues -- namely reorganizing three different groups into one, streamlining data collection and reporting, and trying to get services more accessible.

Homelessness is mainly a byproduct of mental illness and drug addiction. If you want to solve homelessness, you need to target those problems. I would suggest that new technology is needed, particularly in the case of mental illness. We do not have a good medicine to treat schizophrenia, for example.

The city of San Francisco spends $241 million/year on ~7 thousand homeless, an indication that throwing money at this problem doesn't do much.

Any idea why there is no effective medicine for it? It seems like a really important thing to solve. It sounds like a _lot_ of people would benefit.

Human biology is hard. We don't have a cure for AIDS, baldness, acne, heart disease, cancer, the common cold, etc.

Also note that "schizophrenia" is not an illness but a family of illnesses (and even that definition is one of the less fuzzy ones). Finding a "universal cure" is as likely as finding a universal cure for cancer. That is, very unlikely.

Oh wow I didn't know that. I thought it was a neurotransmitter issue with unbalanced levels of various neurotransmitter and/or receptors, but I don't know much about it. Science will get there someday though! I guess for both cancer and complex mental illness and other types of complex illness, the trick would be to both find a workable solution to each sub-problem, and then use them to address the full complex. It would be cool if companies were working on these types of approaches. I wonder if any are?

Human biology is indeed incredibly complex. I'm inspired by the star trek tricorders and medicine. Some day :-)

I read somewhat that this budget also covers around 9k people in shelters (or housed through some other form of aid). If you consider that, you get about $15K/head/year, which is not entirely ridiculous.

That ECS stuff makes me think about that old Heather MacDonald article about The sidewalks of San Francisco and all various interest groups and cynical factions she unveils in her article which she refers to as "Homelessness, Inc". It's forever changed my skepticism around this topic. http://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-133...

Reminds me of Willamette Week's recent story about Portland's failure to build enough affordable housing. The reported reason? The city funds "cool" projects run by "cool" nonprofits instead of spending money where it will do the most good. Super frustrating but also informative.

http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build...

Pretty good quotes from various involved individuals, such as "Our government is so caught up in efforts to appease so many interests that they step right over that guy on the sidewalk to accomplish other goals,"

Since when did we start referring to ourselves as "the tech elite"? This seems like the wrong way to frame the problem, or our relation to it.

It's hard to believe that the problem is a lack of funds when the city's 2015-16 budget allocates $241m to help ~7k homeless people. It sounds more like we can't figure out how to deploy these resources effectively.

Jeez, $35k/yr/person and they're still homeless? If this were happening in my country, I'd be certain most of the money is lining someone's pockets.

That sounds like a ton, but for the estimated 7k-10k homeless people in SF, that's $24k-34k per person annually. A lot of money, but not an insane amount given the high local costs of absolutely everything.

Also: is the $241mil estimate the actual literal amount reserved/given to the homeless of SF -- or is it the budget for the entire project of dealing with homelessness in SF? I see this number get thrown around and I don't think I've ever seen anyone clarify this bit? It seems quite obvious and very significant to factor in operation costs if this is the case.

If things like the budget for those shelters and their employees also come out of the $241mil -- even assuming an even split -- you're probably looking at way less than $30k or even $20k per-person already... Assuming it 'only' cost $50 million to run it all, that's about $19k per person at 10,000 homeless, with 25k-at-7k.

Non-SF resident here. From other stories I have read, it seems to me as if housing prices start to reach levels where even average middle-class workers have trouble finding something affordable.

If this is true, can a program like CHEFS actually get someone out of homelessness?

Don't forget to estimate and log your work

haha! the tools they build are meant for Vogons, not coders. In fact, Jira takes the "agile" out of agile.

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