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Comment by racer-v | Hacker News Reader

Why are we (collectively) only responsible to the homeless in SF? I'm proposing that we all take responsibility for homelessness in America as a whole.

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Giving up until the Federal government solves the problem isn't good enough. Especially because nobody even knows what policies will work. It's better to experiment at the city level.

It sounds like you're giving up until the city solves the problem. I've been homeless and taken in by others, and likewise my family has taken homeless folks into our own house. There is a lot we can do at a personal level, but in the last analysis the problem is systemic: it's caused by capitalism and the regime of private property, not the policies of one city.

I'm glad you've been so selfless. That doesn't mean the Federal government is going to do the first thing about homelessness. Nor does it mean elasticity of demand has the same slope in all markets.

The city of San Francisco is in a unique position of having resources and political will to try new policies. I'll cast my vote accordingly.

You remind me of someone who thinks he can fix a mouse problem in just one room of the house, without paying attention to the other, connected rooms. "I'm only worried about mice which are currently in the bedroom - thinking about the entire house is too much."

Solving big problems works better when you can solve the small problems they're composed of. First figure out how to catch, kill, or deter a mouse and then expand the solution to the rest of the house.

You're way to focused on the concept of elasticity. There's a lot more to figure out before that's the immediate problem.

You're making it sound like this is some difficult research problem. The answer to homelesness is simple: give them homes. Give them food. Give them money. This is how it works in every industrial society that's solved the problem.

Your error is that you're obsessed with trying to fix this within a market economy, by specifically housing them in areas of high economic activity where they can supposedly find "opportunity". That won't work and is counterproductive.

Making people permanently dependent doesn't work either. This country has entire communities subsisting on Medicare and social security. We don't need more of them. There's plenty of space in the places that have jobs and no reason to exclude people.

If you're convinced that you should be making everyone work instead of subsidizing their existence (which is much cheaper), you need to bring jobs outside of the city. Telling everyone to just live in San Francisco doesn't scale.

It can't happen in every city until the first one figures it out. The next step needed is often not the full solution.

Dude nobody in this whole post is saying the federal government shouldn't do anything. Read these threads again.

I'm addressing comments that the solution has to be housing in San Francisco itself, rather than outside the city, such as:

> Only housing near economic opportunity means anything.

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