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Comment by austinheap | Hacker News Reader

We can’t solve mental illness with more quarter million dollar condos. I don’t know why this is still being peddled.

Housing First policies are a huge boon to helping people out of homelessness who are dealing with mental illness.

What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.

And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.

And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.

Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?

A lot of folks enter into mental health crisis from the stress, sleep deprivation and other issues caused by being homeless. Certainly not all. But having gone through a time period dealing with stress and sleep deprivation from the comfort of my home, I can empathize.

“Unhoused” — esp families — are rapidly rehoused in SF. Those experiencing “chronic homelessness” (the ‘visible’ humans, who deserve the same amount of love and respect) are more often tied to mental health…just different things are helpful for the different groups.

Even the chronically homeless with mental health issues benefit greatly from having housing. The key is to make it housing they actually can use, let them have their belongings, their pets foe support, let people come and go as they please so they are not prisoners, and don't force people out of the housing everyday.

A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.

Yeah, you know it's almost like those SROs that basically don't exist anymore actually served a purpose. That type of housing is perfect for getting people off the street and into a warm bed at night, while not imposing very many restrictions on them.

You are assuming they were born homeless.

No but you can prevent people from being evicted and forced onto the street. If the faucet of mental illness is closed then the burden of those who are still there is greatly diminished.

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