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://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-seatt...
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.
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.
But it's reality, not fantasy: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance-overview
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.