Billionaire Marc Benioff donates $30M to research homelessness | Hacker News Reader

Billionaire Marc Benioff donates $30M to research homelessness

cnn.com

25 pointsjelliclesfarm15 comments

Although I applaud the donation, I'm skeptical of what will come of it.

In Canada, at all levels of government, every few years we see a new study being funded on how to end homelessness. Everyone cheers. Finally, someone is doing something! Then the study goes unnoticed, ignored, or is otherwise unactionable.

But no worries, because someone else will fund a study and we'll get to the bottom of it this time!

It's an endless cycle.

Maybe this will be different. It's not government afterall, it's private money. Maybe he'll take an approach similar to Bill Gates and actually do something about the problem he paid to study. It would be a pleasant surprise.

But for now? I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. Marc certainly goes out of his way to portray an image of a good man trying to use his wealth to accomplish good things. I'd really like to see some of that come to more than just P.R.

Here's a recent exposé about homelessness in Seattle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

My takeaway: drug addiction and mental illness are the real problems. Homelessness is just a symptom of the disease. Why does that distinction matter? Building affordable housing without infrastructure and services to address addiction and mental health will not work.

It's 4981 years of hotel here (16.5€/night). There is no secret to discover in homelessness. They have housing and/or drug and/or mental disorder problem. They need to stop using drug, a good psy with a working treatment and a house. House is the simpler to fix. Let's start with that.

How does housing fix the drug or mental disorder problem? How do we pay for the housing or address the issues with supply and demand when providing free housing?

With engineering, very few engineers would start work on a design that only addresses a small part of the known problem space.

As someone who knows struggling addicts with good housing who would otherwise be homeless, yeah, housing does absolutely not fix the problem. It's so complicated.

Nihilism and a lack of a reason to care about getting better. Drugs offer a cheap escape from their grim view of reality. No friends who aren't addicts, so it's normalized.

A criminal record blocking gainful employment. Court mandated treatment programs that prevent people from moving away from their deadend town and self reinforcing social circle of addicts. Court mandated treatment that's forcing them to spend all of their time around other addicts, who only have drugs in common and thus have their relationships built on the shared interest in drugs, preventing them from participating in anything that would lead to a more productive social circle.

Their criminal record might mean that by an enormous margin the most lucrative thing they can do, and perhaps actually their only realistic hope of financial independence, freedom, and an escape from their miserable reality of barely scraping by spending most of their time doing things they hate, is to sell drugs, which is self reinforcing their environment.

Yeah. You describe that well. It is a very difficult problem.

I does not but it's easier to fix.

For me it's a realestate related problem. There is not enough offer. We should increase the offer with very cheap houses.

My father is homeless. No matter how much money you throw at him, he's never been able to be self-reliant. He has not had his own place for over 20 years (I'm 31 years old). He has problems with alcohol and can never stick with anything (jobs, education, trade schools).

I think my father's homeless situation is very similar to 95% of the homeless population. They can't break their old habits or just don't want to. It takes a very competent person to stick with a job, make sure all your bills, and to acquire the skills needed to make someone want to pay you more than minimum wage.

If someone has drive and is competent, there is no reason for them to be homeless. There is so much free information out there or very cheap courses to learn many skills that are in demand.

For $30 million he could pretty much end homelessness, surely? At least in a couple of cities.

I am not a homeless expert but I think a non-insignificant portion of homeless are not mentally stable enough to accept help and are suspicious of anyone that attempts to help them get off the streets.

see this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...

I think the last 50 years have shown that simply throwing money at homelessness won't make it go away. Most modern projects to reduce homelessness have either had unexpectedly underwhelming results or surprisingly large unintended consequences.

I think that is about as clear a sign as we're going to get that our common sense notions about how to solve homelessness are insufficient, which means further scientific research is necessary.

They had a different experience with throwing money at the problem in London. There it actually worked for their test group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-...

San Francisco spends in the neighborhood of $300M per year on homelessness. Feels like research on how to better spend that money will do more than just throwing more money at the problem will.

For $30 million he could build about 70 subsidized apartments in SF.

https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/construction-costs-series

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