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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Under the medically justified urgency of covid, Victoria took a significant number of homeless rough sleeping people (as they are called here in australia) into some kind of housing. Queensland did the same using surplus student purpose built dense housing.

I'm not going to pretend this "solved the problems" but I am told a number of the less intractable cases got put into a better situation,simply having secure shelter helped get them off drug dependency, or back into medication for treatable problems, or away from self harm situations.

Now covid is closing out, the "experiment" is partially unwinding again and this makes me very sad. People will be put back into considerably less suitable housing. People will return to a life led off the rails.

Sure, some want something rough sleeping provides (I really suspect few do but let's not pretend everyone can handle housing up front) and some will continue to be drug affected and crazy will break out.

But for nine months we reduced homelessness and structural health problems to single digit or less and it almost certainly saved money.

That's the truly amazing thing: the net budget effect on federal and state funded interventions was probably better, and they STILL unwound the programmes.

Collective failure of imagination.

Homelessness exists because we let it.

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> That's the truly amazing thing: the net budget effect on federal and state funded interventions was probably better, and they STILL unwound the programmes.

> Collective failure of imagination.

> Homelessness exists because we let it.

You're listening to the words and not understanding the actual motivation. Budgets are a convenient objection but not actually important. Like you observe there are people who would gladly spend more money to make the problem worse.

What you unfortunately need to realize is that there are far too many people who need to know that there are others suffering "because they deserve it".

You will never understand the debate around homelessness[0] as long as you assume everyone agrees it should be solved or that people just haven't discovered the right way to allocate resources.

[0]: You can swap out homelessness with a few other political hotbutton issues as well. I'll leave those to your imagination.

Citation needed that there is a significant cohort of people who effectively believe that homelessness is some sort of divine wrath that shouldn't be interfered with.

Do you doubt that plenty of people think that threat of homelessness is necessary motivation for people to work?

Those people also think that some people being homeless is acceptable trade off given the motivational value of the threat and cost of paying for everyone's accommodation.

Yes, I do doubt that.

Have you never heard the argument that all handouts make people lazy?

It's an opinion of significant percentage of american voters.

See the prosperity gospel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

Homelessness exists because the landlords and business people prefer it. Homelessness is a demonstrated threat of what not paying the rent and having a job will do to you. If you remove that dire threat, the housing market and job market becomes far more competitive for the workers and the owner class is disadvantaged.

In the US, we have many more vacant houses than we have homeless people. The market system is incapable of solving this very simple problem.

That's an interesting theory. I think there are competing interests, though. Landlords and businesses generally won't want homeless people in their areas, though, because their presence alone will decrease property values and rent (landlords), and drive away customers (businesses). But for what you suggest to work, homeless people need to be visible.

Do you have any data on this? This doesn't really pass the smell test for me, even though it potentially sounds like a satisfying explanation of part of the problem.

I don't think GP was saying that landlords keep hoards of miserable homeless people just outside the property, in order to scare tenants into paying their rent. People are plenty aware of economic reality.

They certainly collaborate to keep rent high, its known that property developers in the US don't rent out property in manhattan to keep prices high. Why would they want to solve homelessness? They're motivated by profit in their role at the institution.

This is just nonsense.

Right now, homeless people are not customers, meaning they are not making money off of those people, when they could be if those people were actually renters.

The argument is that would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. It also isn't penny-wise: homeless people don't have cash.

It is absolutely not clear that this would be pound-foolish, and homeless people do have cash if you get them off the streets and back as productive members of society.

Well, yea in a larger sense they would but they don't have cash so you can't rent to them for any significant sums. This is why socialists critique the market system as irrational.

> But for what you suggest to work, homeless people need to be visible.

Not necessarily physically visible. Just mentally visible.

Private property getting in the way again?

I want to believe this is hyperbolic.

Do you really believe business owners, and landlords are sitting in some smokey room plotting to keep people homeless so people will pay their rent?

Really, that is your honest held belief of the situation?

Are you saying that there are not smokey rooms in all countries where they are plotting how to cut public services?

That is a similar, but distinctly different topic.

Indeed, there are always people who are looking to cut public services, but the discussion was about the motive for doing that.

Yeah, but we are not talking about people in general, we are talking about board rooms in think tanks and cameras of commerce. What is the motive there?

That's just your perception of what "we're" talking about. Think about it as you would when debugging software: how might you (an instance of a class in a complex system) know what other people (instances of classes within the system) are "talking about" (where talking derives from thinking/computation that takes place within those object instances)? Are you obtaining this knowledge via the calling of public interfaces? If not, then what is the True source of this knowledge?

Ironically (or not), the title of this overall thread is "This is Real, That's Not". The content of the discussions is a fine reflection of the very phenomenon that Doreen is talking about, and I suspect a plausible demonstration of why humanity can't sort its shit out, decade after decade: an inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the self-delusional nature of the human mind.

> What is the motive there?

The motives are complex, and unknown (the necessary callable public interfaces to obtain such knowledge do not exist - and yet, observe the number of people in this thread who perceive that they have knowledge of the contents of other people's minds. Is this not an extremely interesting phenomenon? Might this phenomenon have consequences in a complex system, especially if it exists but is completely unrealized?

I suspect that a specific, conscious motivation to bring about the specific end state that we are experiencing (inequality, homelessness, human suffering in general) also does not actually exist. Rather, I reckon the mess we are living in is more like some sort of a cosmic demonstration of the law unintended consequences, due to an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities inherent in reality. A religious person may consider this punishment from God for disobedience. A comedian (or a schizophrenic) may consider it to be comedy at its finest. Each individual perceives reality through a custom lens, and comes to vastly different conclusions.

I could be wrong of course, but it's a fun way to look at it. Part of the fun is observing how people react to crazy ideas like this, that may actually have a fair amount of validity to them (how might we know, for sure, if they do, or do not?).

I do agree that it's ironic that a subthread on a post called "This is Real, That's Not" has devolved into conspiracy theories about secret cabals of businesspeople in smoky rooms scheming to cut public services in order to keep people on the streets so that the people not on the streets will be scared into continuing to pay their rent and mortgages.

I don't doubt that there are some people who want this, but the idea that there's a giant, organized, shadowy group out there... that's something out of a very bad spy movie.

And yet, The System seems to reliably produce this outcome in the USA to a much larger degree than elsewhere.

The full spectrum of causation is often (strongly) asserted to be very specific things, but rarely does one encounter any person or organization asserting that the problem is complex and not fully understood. It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some wrongdoing may indeed be happening here and there.

That said, the highly inconsistent (other than confidence levels of assertions) approach to conspiracy theories is indeed wonderfully ironic.

Today is a good example of this...one one hand we have a thread about the abstract notion of CIA deception:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329913

When discussing this sort of topic abstractly, it seems the HN hivememind has no problem whatsoever conceptualizing it.

However, if one changes the topic to a specific, object level news event (Jimmy Wales & Wikipedia), the ability (to conceptualize deceit) seems to vanish, as ~always:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333197

What I am saying is landlords do not believe people are paying (or not paying) rent because of homelessness, nor do landlords believe that if homelessness was solves completely that would mean people would stop paying rent...

That is a ridiculous and moronic position. People can have good faith disagreements on how to solve social problems, and if you believe government is not the right avenue for that solution it does not mean you want or desire people to be homeless.

I think your sentiment is in the right direction but I don’t think it’s as explicit as you’re proposing.

Landlords don’t “prefer” homelessness to exist. Their position, as capitalists, ends with their interests.

Many (not all!) landlord are quite simple: “Pay rent or I will evict you and find someone else”. That’s it.

After an eviction, they don’t care whether the person moves elsewhere or is homeless. In fact I’d argue that most people are probably on the gooder side of good and would prefer their former tenant move elsewhere and live a nice comfortable life and someone else can deal with their poorness.

What they do absolutely want is the ability to enforce that eviction. That’s key. But I doubt they care so much about the looming threat of homelessness.

If someone would end homelessness by providing homes to all of the homeless free of charge and then some more empty ones then landlords would mind very much because this oversupply would make their prices drop. They would accuse homelessness solver of dumping prices.

Landlords "prefer" homelessness exist because that the surplus demand over the supply that they provide.

That already happens. Section 8 is profitable for the right landlords...

Yes, rents going down is not what a landlord wants. Just like salary going down (all things being equal). But it's not as if all landlords are conspiring to keep people homeless to increase their rents.

Yes they would accuse/blame the homelessness solver of decreasing their rents and they would be correct. I'm not a landlord and I would 'blame' or point out the same thing. That doesn't mean that I think it's wrong while at the same time correctly identifying it as the cause...

We have it over and over and over again that housing first is the approach that works. Yet it is very hard for society to stomach the idea of giving someone a handout "no matter what they have done or will do".

I don't know why but this seems to be the primary psychic barrier to doing this thing we know works and which can in some cases even be cheaper than services first aid.

You can't give free housing to the unfortunate and at the same time increase rent on the workers. Workers need to see homeless people every day so they can feel better off and scared to end up like them.

Everything else is bad for real estate investors.

The motivations of moneyed interests are obvious. But the contempt the working and middle classes have for the poor is something I'll never understand.

I've often been obliged to pay for something I've seen others acquire freely and I say good for them. I wouldn't exchange places with them for a moment. It seems the pettiest of all things to begrudge someone whose life is a disater, even in the rare cases when it is of their own making.

"...socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

(paraphrasing Steinbeck)

>>But the contempt the working and middle classes have for the poor is something I'll never understand.

Really? Should be fairly easy to understand, for a Middle Class Family that is living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to save for retirement, the kids collage fund, maybe help pay for a aging parent, save for home repair, and provide daily expenses seeing a good chunk of their earnings being stolen errr "taxed" away from them, money that they could use to provide for their own needs is a large part of it.

Taxation is only theft in the US, in the rest of the world you get something for it (health care, free education).

Taxation is always theft... If I steal your TV but clean your house, mow your yard, and perform other services "worth" same as your TV, I have still stolen your TV even though you got something for it.

Perhaps those who object have more to lose or have worked harder. Everyone has had different challenges that shape their perspective. We can never assume to understand another person’s motivation or understanding.

We can't, but we can certainly judge that perspective to be counter-productive.

I'm concerned about outcomes. Let's stop for a minute and assume that I'm an unfeeling, non-empathetic person who doesn't care about anyone but himself. Even then, I would advocate to allocate more money to homeless services, regardless of how that money is used, because doing so would benefit me: I don't want to see human feces on the sidewalk, or used syringes, or disease-carrying rats running around near tent encampments, or mentally-ill people screaming at me as I walk by.

People who adopt the attitude that we shouldn't give people a generous safety net because they haven't done anything to "deserve" a handout are quite simply cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They're making their lives actively worse just to "teach a lesson" to those "undeserving" homeless people.

ETA: when I say ‘you’, it’s not personal. Sometimes I type as stream of consciousness and it’s more a figure of speech. I am trying to fix this habit while commenting. This seemed to be a good time to clarify. Not sure I want to edit the entire comment and sentence structure.

If you want clean streets, ban vagrancy and street living.

You can’t save everyone. Savior complex is self serving. At some point, you have to cut damaging/damaged people lose.

The sanctimonious savior complex is frankly nauseating ..especially when it achieves nothing but create noise that is pleasing only to the one practicing the virtue-signaling sounds.

I attended al-anon meetings for three months to support a friend and continued going to them because I found it helpful to understand the effect addiction(of all kinds) has on the normal people around them. We have to be kind. Yes. But we are not our ‘brothers’ keepers’, as it were.. we need social boundaries when it comes to taking over the burden of those over whom/whose actions we have no control.

> They're making their lives actively worse just to "teach a lesson" to those "undeserving" homeless people.

The last US election showed us that there are a LOT of these kind of people.

Most of them call themselves religious, too.

What does the election has anything to do with this? We have only spent more on homelessness since the last election?

The problem with Housing First, like with any Welfare program, it abuse. Housing First programs are ripe for abuse and are abused.

While yes it is cheaper in some ways, the problem is people will be less likely to be creative or lean on personal support networks (i.e couch surfing, live with family, etc) if the government through the taxpayer will just hand you a key to an apartment no questions asked....

There were a couple of times we were technically homeless as a child, I slept many nights on the floor of my grandparents home, or an uncle, etc. so I am not unsympathetic to being in this condition. However I also do not believe government handouts are a solution to the problem

I believe in Handups, but not handouts.

I hate to call it abuse, but I do wonder how one avoids rewarding bad behaviour.

There are a lot of poor people who work very hard to provide for their family. I don't know what should we do for them.

Teach them financial literacy. Upskill them. And encourage girls/women to practice safe sex. Large families without stable jobs/income end up living in the fringes of poverty and will eventually fall without a safety net. Time and again, low rates of literacy and teenage pregnancies and poor household income are correlated.

Abuse? How? And how do you know this? Where is the history of the entire world has this been attempted?

I'm tired of hearing how people think it will go. Pre-critics and naysayers. I want action, drastic action that has never been done before to solve problems that have never been solved before. Offer a solution or go back to work.

It has been solved though. Most post industrial countries have solved or minimized it with generous safety nets.

You seem to think that we shouldn’t do X because it is ripe for abuse and are abused. So we shouldn’t do politics then because it is ripe for abuse and are abused (corruption)? And we shouldn’t have CEO’s then because being a CEO is ripe for abuse and are abused? We shouldn’t have corporations in general for the same reason? Or is it only things you don’t like that we shouldn’t do for those reasons?

I believe the primary psychic barrier is that when people propose a solution, they perceive that they are working from a perfectly accurate, comprehensive model of reality, when what they are really working from is a perspective upon a very simplified, personal model of reality.

And what is overlooked/unrealized is not just the missing data (that which exists, but is not perceived by the individual), but also all the "forces" at play, like complex causation, individual preferences (many of which are highly illogical), behind the scenes string-pulling, randomness/chaos, and so forth and so on.

If we could somehow find a way to get even a few people to realize (and honestly acknowledge) that we all live within a complex, interconnected and interactive system, full of uncertainty and illusion, could we perhaps start to come up with some solutions that take this complexity into consideration (and therefore are more resistant to being derailed by simple rhetoric and propaganda)?

Housing first doesn’t mean free housing for life.

Here in California, we have huge budgets to tackle the homeless problems, which are paid for from taxes. Yet the homeless situation has not changed anywhere here that I can see. Where is that tax money going to?

Most of the money is going to places that aren't immediately visible: it's paying to keep people with marginal financial situations in their homes (and paying to keep newly re-housed people housed). Without that help, there would be many more people living on the streets than there are now. The stuff that you do notice, like hiring people to do street outreach and try to help homeless people directly, is a small part of the homelessness budget.

That doesn't mean it's going super great. There are still a lot of people on the streets, obviously, and depending on where you look, either it's getting worse, or at best it's like they're treading water.

But it turns out combating homeless is just expensive, even though arguably it can be cheaper than just doing nothing (taxpayers end up paying for those 911 calls and unpaid emergency room visits after all), but there are a lot of people who have an aversion to "just giving away money to people who don't deserve it". They'd rather pay to clean up after a homeless person, year after year, than pay to make that person not homeless, even if the latter would cost less. So funding is hard to fight for, and funding levels are never enough to fix things.

San Francisco's allocation for this is a single-digit percentage of the city budget (your assertion that their budget is "huge" is incorrect; here it's a few hundred million on a $5B budget), and yet it is one of the biggest, most obviously visible problems the city is facing. Sure, simply throwing more money at a problem doesn't make it go away, but insufficient funding -- as is currently the case -- is going to ensure the problem remains.

> But for nine months we reduced homelessness and structural health problems to single digit or less and it almost certainly saved money.

> That's the truly amazing thing: the net budget effect on federal and state funded interventions was probably better, and they STILL unwound the programmes.

According to the treasurer of Victoria, they allocated $150 million budget to provide this accommodation for 2000 people. That comes out to $75,000 per person. According to the University of Queensland, taking a homeless person off the street saves about $13,000 in additional medical and policing costs. So the covid measures certainly didn't save money. Normal state provided housing comes a lot closer to the $13,000 mark if you take a look at how much those programs costs, but they tend to be at 100% capacity all of the time. It's also worth noting that while Victoria reports providing 2000 homeless people with housing during the pandemic, the state is reported to have somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 homeless.

There are definitely not 20k+ Victorians out on the streets every night. That figure almost certainly includes the vast majority of homeless people who are sleeping on mates' couches etc.

Thing is, if you make a reasonable service available, "the vast majority of homeless people who are sleeping on mates' couches" will be competing for the same spots with those who actually are sleeping on the streets otherwise.

If some sort of safety net is available, then some people who'd otherwise find some solution to pay rent - whether it's going over their heads in payday loans or getting into petty crime or resorting to prostitution or some other way - some of them will choose to actually use that safety net instead. So the demand for that safety net if it's available should be expected to be larger than the number of people who "fell through" in the absence of it.

Sure, but those people who sleep on friends couches, or in homeless shelters, or in boarding houses occasionally are all people who sleep rough sometimes. Gathering statistics on this is not the easiest thing to do, but I’ve read more than once that about two thirds of Australia’s homeless sleep rough regularly. So while there might not be 25,000 people sleeping on the streets of Victoria on any given night, a good portion of that number will find themselves doing it often enough.

Meaning if you want to keep those people from sleeping out in public places, then you really do need to provide all of them with housing, and also that you certainly can’t provide only 2000 of them with temporary housing and then claim that you’ve solved homelessness (even only temporarily).

That's a forward commitment for 18 months of secure housing and 24 months of complete support for mental and physical health and welfare. Its not the amount spent to take 2,000 people off the streets right now.

You're correct, if you look at the line items in the budget the cost to get 2000 people off the street right now is actually $42,250 per person per year. Still far from $13k. Also depending on what document you look at it's either 2000 people or 1700 people so it's somewhere between $42,250 and $49,705.

The easiest way to solve homelessness is to build a home. The legal minimum is 72 sq.ft per person. Dorms and shared kitchens and bathrooms can also be a solution.

There should be no room for thought processes that pretend that we can solve homelessness by any other means than just give people a home.

Just build high density villages with basic facilities so a place exists for people to take stock before figuring out their lives. Maybe they can be there till they finish education. Maybe till they recuperate from illness or use it as rehab. Or live there till they get a better job. Short lease, minimal rent. A breathing space.

In San Francisco I believe we've been housing some homeless people in hotels (which have been otherwise empty due to COVID). From what I understand, the funding for that is drying up very soon, which is really unfortunate. Supposedly the plan is to get people into more permanent housing, but I can't see how that's going to happen on such a short time scale, so I expect that sadly many of the people in hotels now will end up back on the street.

Since you mention that some people in your area have managed to get themselves into a better situation just because they'd been housed for a bit, I wonder if that's true for any number of people here. But I'm also afraid that any gains will be quickly erased with our new lockdown that's going into effect Sunday night (which essentially winds us back to March with most businesses closed0, which could take away any newly-found jobs.

The US doesn't have universal healthcare either, which is another massive barrier to getting out of homelessness. It's like an ideal lubricant to slide people into destitute existence, and like a honeypot plant, climbing back out requires navigating barbs and thorns.

Well because rich people let it.

That's an important distinction.

The working class is in no position to take care of homeless ppl.

I like the observations you make, and I think you are correct in them.

I object to this though:

"Collective failure of imagination"

There is so much wrong with that statement, I barely know where to start.

Government is a collection of individuals. Individuals do have imagination. But in this case, no imagination is even required - as you point out there is the previous 9 months of data.

What we find is no interest in improving the situation of those in the worst position. Have you considered the possibility, that it is government that creates these situations in the first place?

More broadly, I object to the commonly held idea that government is there to help us at all, despite that being what we are taught in its schools. It is there to rule us.

You can confirm this if you can break down the word 'government'. 'Govern' (has root as kyberenetes) means rule with authority. '-ment' means relating to minds, like 'mental'. The word literally means 'rule minds'.

Yeah, probably not. You might as well say that "carpet" means "a domestic animal that inhabits your automobile", because "car"+"pet".

Generally speaking, you can't get at the meaning of a word by decomposing it into its etymological roots, even if you're lucky or educated enough to pick the correct roots.

For a nice (heh) example of why, look up the etymology of the word "nice", for example, here:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/nice

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