Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

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The reason that we can and should do housing first is for two reasons.

First, it's cheaper than any of the alternatives. From the NEAH, a paragraph describing those savings:

> Finally, permanent supportive housing has been found to be cost efficient. Providing access to housing generally results in cost savings for communities because housed people are less likely to use emergency services, including hospitals, jails, and emergency shelter, than those who are homeless. One study found an average cost savings on emergency services of $31,545 per person housed in a Housing First program over the course of two years.xii Another study showed that a Housing First program could cost up to $23,000 less per consumer per year than a shelter program.

Next, it's just extremely effective. Being homeless over any period of time negatively affects mental well-being. The longer that you are homeless, the worse this gets, and the harder it is to get out. Housing first isn't just the cheapest solution, it actually solves the problem of homelessness directly and helps people to heal their mental state. You can find this information all over the place.

Ultimately, we should have rapid housing-first policies for everyone who ends up homeless, but that will require the American public to give up our normally punitive cultural attitudes so that the data can win, but we haven't done the best job ending other punitive systems despite their total failure, like the war on drugs.

Quote is from: http://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/housin...

I really, genuinely hope I am wrong and that this program works out. I am 100% on board for expanding it if the trials works.

First, you risk creating formerly-homeless slums. Any landlord that accepts homeless ends up upsetting paying tenants. As much as we love to help homeless--there is a NIMBYism here. Most of us are all for helping the homeless until we are finding needles in bushes and our kids are accosted by drunkards.

I hate to be so harsh, but the bleeding hearts would be a lot more skeptical of housing the homeless if they started moving into their neighborhoods.

Second, municipalities that offer generous support for homeless may end up with a greater homeless population because of immigration from other cities/towns. There isn't much of a solution for this so long as homelessness is tackled on a local basis.

> I hate to be so harsh, but the bleeding hearts would be a lot more skeptical of housing the homeless if they started moving into their neighborhoods.

I absolutely agree with this, and we can find data that supports this concept quite aggressively throughout US history, with one example being that racial integration in schools stopped when it came to northern cities. It was fine as long as we pretended it was a southern problem, but today the most racially segregated schools can be found in major urban centers.

Ultimately, most decisions are made emotionally, and in order to move human society to the next stage of ethical development, we will need to combine an ethical baseline of human welfare (Singer style reverse utilitarianism comes to mind) with the application of data and statistics. Unfortunately, thinking statistically is difficult, and the human mind is capable of rationalizing emotional decision making before the thought it complete.

Ultimately the problem of homelessness is easily solvable from some pure mathematical/economic standpoint, but fails for the same reason that supply/demand is not a law of human society: it all depends on rational actors, a unicorn-like construct.

It doesn't mean that we cannot apply data to our decision making, but it _does_ mean that we need to work our hardest to defend decisions based on high quality data, high quality data analysis, and well-replicated science. Housing first is an idea where all of the early analysis has been extremely promising, and the NIMBY-ism that surrounds it should be called out for what it is: emotional decision making that disregards data and science resulting in a lack of compassion for people. I will say it's unethical, but it's also completely and totally human.

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