Hacker News Reader

Comment by idworks1 | Hacker News Reader

If they decline, you can't force them. The goal is not to reduce the metric to 0 homeless on the streets. The whole attempt is to help people who are homeless get back on their feet. When you have food, a place to stay, and support then you can start thinking about improving your situation.

There will be a number that will reject any help. But the overwhelming majority will want to improve their lives and programs like this will give them an opportunity.

View on HN

That's not the goal according to whom?

I think there's multiple sides of the argument that getting everyone off the streets is the goal:

From one angle, if someone's in such a bad state that they refuse shelter, is it really better from a "help them get back on their feet" to leave them there?

From another angle, we treat very few other civic obligations as "optional." If you don't want to pay sales tax, you still have to, for instance.

Often, it's not the simple. Some times it takes months of trust building. Sometimes the person is part of a community, a community they may have been part of for months or years. Yes their life isn't easy, but putting them in housing might remove them from that support network. Often times people are terrified to move away from the only group of people they've known.

this is deeply on display in the "According to Need" podcast series released by 99% invisible recently. https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

Ideally everyone would see the benefits and realize this is better, but these people have a lifetime of other issues and being houseless is only part of it.

Certainly I think the first priority of any homelessness agenda should be to keep people from falling into it and treat existing issues before they ruin someone's life and sidestep many of those problems in the first place.

But I am deeply skeptical of arguments that, having gone that far down an unsuccessful path, you now should gain extra rights and freedoms that override the wishes of the rest of the people in the city you're in. Though I could see this be on a scale - for instance, I think Seattle owes less to people who move to Seattle without housing than they do to people who had housing in Seattle who got priced out.

This frames the issues in terms of rights and freedoms. Left alone the homeless tend to cause property damage, commit small crimes, and generate calls to emergency services because of their behavior. On average these emergency responses alone cost around $100k/year. Given that money matters it can make sense to give out some free benefits in order to reduce other negative impacts. This frames the situation in terms of costs and benefits for different alternatives.

SCOTUS interpreted[0] the right of free movement to make "owes less to people who move to Seattle without housing" illegal.

We can't fix chronic homelessness because the remedies are either illegal at a federal level (privileging locals, asylums) or against the sensibilities of voters in the regions where it is concentrated (prosecuting illegal drug use).

[0] I can't remember the ruling now, was a city in the NE IIRC

Edwards v. California? Saenz v. Roe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._California

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saenz_v._Roe

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson

> The ruling in the case invalidated state durational residency requirements for public assistance.

Yes, thank you!

Wow, surprising Saenz v Roe occurred when Shapiro v Thompson had already been decided.

But, yeah, all these cases make any state with improved welfare benefits a migration target for unproductive people. Classic game theory situation.

Agree with all you are saying. The thing that baffles me is how the homeless can just take over a public space and it's just supposed to be, ok?

It's like some strange eminent domain situation. Seems obvious that I should not be able to just claim a public space for myself.

It also seems obvious to me that people don't have some kind of right to live wherever they want (like the heart of Brentwood in LA has been transformed from a beautiful fun place to a sad wasteland).

My solution to homelessness is basically reducing housing costs by dropping minimum parking requirements, height restrictions, min sizes units, etc.

And mental health treatments.

I'm generally su

FWIW, legally you can force them off the streets if you offer them housing:

https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/our-programs/advocac... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan_v._Carey

This is a legal judgement, not a moral one

I read both your links, and I saw literally nothing about "forcing" anyone off the streets. What I did see was a lot about peoples' right to shelter in NYC, which does not imply that someone couldn't freely choose to live on the streets. In other words, nobody needs to live on the streets, but it doesn't look like anyone's necessarily prohibited from doing so, either.

Am I missing something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com