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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Other countries, other states, other cities have "solved" this problem in a bunch of different ways, it's not a unique problem. What's unique is the city's unwillingness to actually solve it.

At the core, you need to spend more money by basically giving these people healthcare, mental health care, and a place to live.

"But that's not fair, what about all the good, honest citizens of the city who work their asses off to pay the exorbitant rents and exorbitant health insurances and still struggle to put food on the table bla bla bla"

No, it's not fair, but as long as that mentality rules, SF will have a homeless problem. The city sure as fuck doesn't lack the money to solve it, it lacks political will.

"But that's socialism!"

Yes. Now do you want to solve the problem, or keep sticking your head in the sand and hope it goes away through the magic of capitalism and the free market?

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The article itself points out that SF is already spending $305 million a year on homelessness. The number of homeless people is only officially 6500. It's probably closer to 12,000 but how much more do you want to spend? That's $46K per person!

You prop up this solution of something vague but close to socialism as a silver bullet, but with no evidence. If $46K per person doesn't show that socialism is failing to work, then what will?

their spending is inefficient largely because of anti-socialist attitudes. it's not politically viable to just give the homeless $30k a year tax free but it's almost certainly the cheapest and most effective way to solve the problem

Giving anyone who shows up and claims they are homeless $30K is the cheapest and most effective way to solve the problem? It sounds like the most effective way to rob SF of its treasury.

As parent pointed out, they're already at 40k+ per person at the moment. Why would lowering that rob them?

Because more people would apply. Giving away money doesn't just attract people within your city's borders only.

"30k spending per person" does not mean each homeless person gets 30k. This money goes to all the workers who go through papers, work at shelters, office people to write papers to try to get more money from the federal government, and all sorts of other bureaucracy.

Almost none of it goes to the homeless people themselves.

As stated elsewhere, many of them are addicted to drugs and have mental health issues. Giving someone with one or both of those problems $30k won't help.

It seems stupid to blame socialism for this, when really SF's problem is that they throw money at problems but don't care enough about efficacy. The most effective policy for ending homelessness is socialist: The government simply gives the homeless person a house, no questions asked, no strings attached. You want a house, you get one.

The homeless person now has a house, and so they're not homeless. (duh!) It's shockingly simple, and ruthlessly effective at not only getting people off the street but solving health, addiction, and employment problems. Oh, and did I mention that it's way cheaper than the traditional patchwork model of mitigating homelessness?

Again, and again, simply giving away houses is a cheaper and more effective way at ending this problem. Cases in point:

Utah cut homelessness by over 90%. [0]

Finland has had similar results. [1]

Just today, NPR reported that Chicago hospitals cut ER costs and improved the health of frequent homeless patients by simply giving them an apartment.[2]

Housing First works. It's a waste of time and money to do anything else. Oh and it's gasp socialist!

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

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/mar/22/finl...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/581778796/er-use-goes-down-as...

> The government simply gives the homeless person a house, no questions asked, no strings attached. You want a house, you get one.

Your references don't support this.

[0]

> The idea of Housing First is that housing comes first, services later. Clients do have to pay some rent — either 30 percent of income or up to $50 a month, whichever is greater.

They also review every case and only provide housing to those that aren't dealing drugs, and aren't violent.

[1]

> Tenants pay rent and are entitled to receive housing benefits. Depending on their income, they may contribute to the cost of the services. The rest is covered by the municipalities. They provide the support themselves or buy support from other service providers, mainly from the NGOs.

[2] is in reference to Chicago. I don't think that city is a success story.

It's a socialist program.

It's effective.

It's cheaper.

It's giving housing first.

Finally, Numbers and Chicago don't care what you think.

> It's a socialist program.

> It's effective.

I never said there shouldn't be any social services. I don't think 100% socialism is the answer, though.

> It's cheaper.

You are comparing San Francisco to other areas which run these programs, and holding it up as if it is the only alternative to socialism. This is hardly true, isn't it?

> It's giving housing first.

Only to those that play by the rules. I think that is really the best solution out there. A compromise between self responsibility and care.

> Finally, Numbers and Chicago don't care what you think.

And? You thought I think they do?

  SF is already spending $305 million a year... That's $46K per person!

That counts only SF expenditures, not state or Federal.

It probably does count much of the state and federal spending on SF homelessness, which is funneled through the city budget (as revenue that pays for an expense) and not direct state/federal spending that bypasses the City and County.

  It probably does count much of the state and federal spending

If you're going to directly contradict the article, it would be helpful to give your conflicting source.

The article doesn't make the claim of excluding federal and state funding, and the usual method of reporting expenditures by a public jurisdiction would include spending which happened to be supported by (e.g., backfilled by partial matching funds, in one common model) money from other jurisdictions at higher levels.

A couple of points:

1) City spending isn't the full picture. How much money does the city lose because tourists/people/businesses choose other places because they perceive SF as a dump? That's the true cost of the problem, and the obvious answer is that as long as you spend below that amount to solve the problem, it's a win.

2) $46k is a crazy amount of money in my mind. What? How? How can you spend all that money and not get any results other than basic survival? Is it incompetence on a massive scale? Corruption? A failure of imagination?

3) Again, my main point is that this is a solved problem. It is not a unique problem. Contrary to what a bunch of other commenters in this thread have said, SF is not a unique snowflake of a city where this problem is magically unsolveable. It's the fucking not-invented-here syndrome from the software world, but applied to city politics. This is not rocket science. This is not uncharted territory. Learn from others, ffs.

Much of that is going into housing, so what little is left is likely not enough for the full gamut of professional services that these individuals likely require.

I wasn't under the impression that the current issue in SF was a lack of willingness for politicians in both the city, and the state, to throw money at the problem due to constituents complaining it is unfair due to its socialistic resemblence. But I'll admit I haven't read about it as much since I moved from SF.

Pragmatism over ideology should be the rule of politics. Whatever works and provides the better situation. Too many people get bent out of shape over whether something is liberal or conservative, whether it's fair, whether it applies to their situation (I had to work hard for my home), etc. How about whether it solves the problem?

Orange county is certainly very pragmatic about it. Down there or Irvine, if you're homeless and the cops see you, you get driven to city limits, identity recorded, and told not to come back.

The second time you get beat up, recorded again and driven to city limits. The third time and afterwards, you get beat up, all your stuff gets destroyed/confiscated, and you're driven to city limits.

There is no homeless problem in Orange County/Irvine despite it having nicer weather than San Francisco.

Evidence says otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yRZbbJ9kyg

Pretty sure beating up citizens and telling them not to come back is unconstitutional.

Thank for putting it into words for me. Its so hard to express political support for these types of solutions without being decried as a naive bleeding-heart liberal.

That said I'm under the impression that a huge fraction of bay-area homeless are of the mentally-unsound variety not the out-of-work variety.

Which sounds like a lack of proper mental health services in the area, including institutions. Those homeless because of mental illness probably can't function well enough to provide for themselves. Society should be taking care of them. And it's much more likely for those people to become productive if they're receiving proper care.

If we can eminent domain land to build walls and pipelines, we can do it for housing. This isn't about money; it's cheap to build housing. It's about land.

Seize it and build housing. The end.

EDIT: Of course this will never happen in the U.S. and we will always have homeless people and poor people like it's some axiom of civilization.

In America, the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment requires that property owners must be compensated when their property is seized for public purposes, so any seizures still come out of the government’s budget. States are supposed to raise resources using their tax power, not the police power. The correct law to reform is California’s tax limitation law, Proposition 13.

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