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Comment by sharkmerry | Hacker News Reader

>The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services.

> When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.

You listed 3 reasons, 2 of which has to do with the church, the third reason changed with new mayor, so now it all fell apart?

What happeneded to the mormon social services? Were they not successful without the local government redirecting people to the church services (which should be illegal?, separation of church and state)

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Another non-Mormon, non-religious immigrant to Utah chiming in here:

"which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.

> "which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.

"Separation of Church and State" being a sacred principle is quite ironic.

I think one of the biggest political problems in the US right now is the fixation on dogma for its own sake. It's happening all over the political spectrum and predictably leads to the dysfunction of polarization (where factional dogmas conflict) or dysfunction of purity (where there's little dogmatic conflict, because the dogmas are always incomplete). We're probably overdue for an era of pragmatic compromise.

Or more likely, it highlights a failing of the civic institutions' responsibilities to properly address the problem themselves, rather than relying on an external service provider, whatever the source. That is to say, in this day and age, a high-trust society should be unnecessary; these are basic services that state and local government need to be addressing, rather than budgeting only for the police department.

It should be illegal for the government to inform people of available services, even if some of them are provided by a church? No, separation of church and state is about each having their own, unique power structure and operating as independent organizations. Independent organizations should be perfectly capable of discussing services given by other organizations, especially if they don't offer any equivalents.

Now if they were busing them over and unloading them directly in the waiting hands of the church, without consent, then that sounds less like independent organizations.

It fell apart because it required cooperation between the church, police, and the local government. Any one of those is potentially disruptive. And two changed. The social services still exist as far as I know but aren't as well utilized.

I don't think it is illegal for the government to redirect people to faith based charities, any more than it would be illegal to redirect them to secular charities, however, I am not a lawyer.

can you elaborate just a bit more? in your original post you made it seem like the church, police, and local government had some kind of stable cooperative dynamic on an institutional level. but then you say it fell apart in the aftermath of a single election without much explanation. are the new mayor and police chief taking things in a radically different direction, or was it just a temporary alignment between the leaders as individuals?

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