Homelessness: The Problem That Even Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Solve

This is very closely related to the idea of reform vs. revolution. Sometimes you just need to burn the whole thing down to get the outcome you want.

But the money might have to come from the government. Private prisons don't seem to mind.

> Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the consensus remains that more is needed.

(Source: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... )

That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end?

And, indirectly, the Police make money from homelessness because they can use it to get their budgets increased.

Give free or extremely cheap housing to every homeless person and the lucrative real estate companies and investment funds will disappear.

Even if you truck in prefab, where will you put it if no one will zone or sell you the land to place it on? Everyone wants to be upwardly mobile, and many signal status with their housing. Would you live in a trailer park with your kids? Would you invite your coworkers over for game night to the double wide? No one wants to live next to trailer parks, I know because I try to buy and build them. Existing trailer parks are valuable because zoning for new ones is incredibly difficult, and the cap rates (return on investment) are higher than single family homes or smaller multi family.

Perhaps you'll argue that prefab isn't a trailer. Fair. People still want to live in the best neighborhood with the best schools their money can buy, which is rarely a prefab or inexpensively constructed community (see: signaling, with a dash of entrenched interests such as taxing authorities and builder profits).

Remember white flight? Very similar. Humans are tribal, will always seek status, and always measure themselves against others. These are deep rooted socioeconomic problems to solve. It's not just a matter of spitting housing out of a factory Gigafactory style.

E.g. the idea that you can handle fundamental social problems though purly technological solutions if absurd but exactly that idea is commonly pushed by SV.

The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for financial reasons, like the loss of income or the lack of affordable housing. The fastest growing demographic of homeless people are entire families, because of financial reasons.

Therefore the most effective solutions are economic and perhaps anti-trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_trap

You do not want your landlord and your employer to be the same. (Unless you're a live in manager of the property, then it's more likely to make sense). For one thing, it makes looking for another job much harder, because you'll presumably have to move as well. For another, because an employee that lives at the employer's housing may never interact with people who aren't employees, and end up even more disconnected from the community at large.

It may make sense for Facebook (or others) to put their money to work increasing housing supply by building denser housing, or by financing such building, but they need to divest as soon as practical. If the issue is employees can't live near work, because housing is too expensive, increasing the supply near work should help with that, even if you don't restrict the new units to employees.

It's mind-boggling, like commuting is some special Hell only they experience. Nobody bats an eye when Manhattan schoolteachers are in the bridge & tunnel crowd, but if you listen to some folks they will assure you that San Francisco's children deserve teachers who live near their schools, and anything else would be a travesty. Think of the children!

One point is most homeless have long standing attachment to the bay area. Both social and economic. There are a lot of very negative effects to moving vulnerable people.

The flipside is is there a reason that the big tech companies need to import tech bros to work in one of the most expensive land in the world. And in particular a place where creating new housing units is frightfully expensive? Seriously why not some place like Waco Texas? In Waco Texas a Tech Bro could live like a king and send his kids to private school on half the salary.

Good luck ever finding a "real" solution, if "working for everyone" is your requirement. Also, I don't support more homeless shelters, though I can see how my first post could be interpreted as that.

You can give someone who's homeless a home, but that gives them zero tools to keep it. There's an assumption that the person doesn't need supplimental support to have a productive path forward, and thats just wrong.

SF presumed that putting more public toilets on the street would keep people from defecating on the street, that was disproven in several areas, people would just relieve themselves wherever they felt like. I unfortunately would routinely see someone drop a #2 on the street less than 100 feet away from the very well maintained public bathroom.