Comment by freyir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freyir | Hacker News Reader

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San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. How many more people need to be placed in supportive housing in San Francisco before this problem is solved?

If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families?

When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.

> San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country.

Is it actually higher in SF than in NYC?

> When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street.

This is a fascinating idea. Does this mean that kicking one person out of housing somehow remove two from the street?

Or could it mean that three people end up homeless in the time that it takes to house one homeless person?

If I remember correctly from my time there many of SF's homeless are migrants: they're not people who lived in SF and became destitute, but people who moved in/were moved (tales of cities putting homeless en masse on Greyhounds to SF abound) from places with worse weather and economies.

In that sense I understand Newsom's position: if homeless are already migrating from all over the US due to life being easier in San Francisco, it might only get worse in the city if conditions improve for individuals. It sucks, but we can't expect SF to solve America's homeless problem alone.

Hmmm… I‘ve heard conflicting sources on this and that studies show that SF homeless don’t have a higher degree of having moved from elsewhere. The vast majority has been here a considerable amount of time. Maybe I’m misremembering though.

Pulling a 2019 source from wikipedia, over 30% of San Francisco's homeless recently came from outside San Francisco, and only 50% had lived in San Francisco longer than 10 years before most recently becoming homeless:

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

That seems like a far cry from the exponential growth described where you house one homeless person and 2 appear.

They’re not incompatible statements. The easier it is to be homeless, the more homeless you get. That’s different from where they come from.

Not sure I follow. If the homeless aren't coming from elsewhere, then the "ease" would have to be that people on the margins would be choosing to be homeless instead. However, if that's the case, then why would NYC be immune to this effect? After all, they have way more shelters than SF, rents are just as sky high, and SF residents typically have a higher income than their NYC counterparts meaning there should be fewer people at the margins.

Or maybe the easier it is to end up homeless, the more homeless you get.

Between wages and housing costs, it's unclear to me how ~half of SF isn't homeless.

I'm not sure people whose goal in life is living in a tent under the freeway exist in any significant numbers outside of the imagination of libertarians.

One of the solutions they’re trying now is for the state to give development quotas to municipalities, and threaten to break up single family zoning areas if not.

That it’s such a huge issue in 2 separate massive municipalities makes me agree - it’s a problem that needs solutions at a higher level (often by forcing lower levels to do what is necessary)

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