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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet.

(From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space, and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)

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There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it.

What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)

To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible.

"San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...

At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes

While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".

That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves.

e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.

Convert the empty real estate to the mental health facilities that Reagan emptied?

Maybe that's the case, but instead why not rent apartments on behalf of the homeless people, put them there, and get them evaluated and treated by a mental health professional?

Living in an actual building rather than a tent in a parking lot ("protected" or otherwise) seems like a great first step and healing some of those mental health issues.

When the treatment starts working to a degree that the formerly-homeless person can be trusted with the cash, give it to them, along with the rent bills.

Not if there isn't enough housing.

I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?

It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.

Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.

I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/

[2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...

Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers?

In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.

What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.

Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.

That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.

What would a homeless person do with an office?

Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.

That's great to hear!

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