San Francisco’s “Housing First” Nightmare
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
The whole thing is a scheme for local politicians to enrich their friends and family in the construction and real estate businesses. They buy new buildings using public funds, let junkies trash the buildings, then use that as an excuse to buy even more new buildings.
San Francisco's government is effectively a single-party system (ostensibly the elections for city government are non-partisan, but let's be real.) Politicians face virtually no accountability, and who's fault is this? It's the electorate who keeps voting to put the same failures back in charge. This is what the people of San Francisco vote for, and how does anybody propose to fix that?
I just finished reading Sanfransicko by Michael Shellenberger, who is a critic of housing first.
He doesn't seem like the most trustworthy author, especially after reading parts of his other book, Apocalypse Never, this scathing review of it (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-scienc...), and Shellenberger's really poor defense (https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/8/3/bad-scie...)
However I think what Shellenberger is saying makes a lot of sense: you shouldn't give free housing to people without asking for something in return like getting off of drugs or taking antipsychotic meds. Shelters, yes, apartments, no. Addicts go into these places, overdose, and die, because there is no one around to help them when they overdose. It is also just a huge waste resource-wise and might even make the problem worse, because you are enabling people to live these lifestyles that they need to get out of.
If you check out @bettersoma on twitter he's got a looooot of info about this.
It got a mediocre success rate but its 100x better than whats happening now.
No, that has never, ever been the plan for housing first homelessness solutions. Its to put them in housing first. Then, surround them with case workers, medical care, social services, etc to get them the help they need.
By all means, criticize your local implementation, but that isn't housing first.
How much do you want to spend on this? Everything you listed out costs money, and it seems like SF spends on all of those services without much measurable success.
Remember there is finite money and there are hard decisions about whether to spend some money on say a homeless adult person that has been given many chances vs a young child who may be even more influenceable with the same amount of money. In many case these taxes are coming from families who no longer have the choice to spend that money on their young child or own family members.
Given infinite resources it may be worth it, but at the cost of robbing say a young child of these resources or multiple life-times of labor it may not.
Homeless people aren't helpless animals in need of coddling. They are human beings with intelligence, perfectly capable of exploiting incentives and your kindness.
They terrorize eachother, and those who interact with them.
It only takes attempting to help a homeless person 2-3 times in person to see and understand that.
Needle exchanges, supervised injection sites, and cash stipends to addicts are going to be looked back on as hideously poor policy, and their supporters have blood on their hands.
Note: I've been homeless twice. Both times I wanted to get out of it my step A has literally been "find lowest cost of living place in the country with low unemployment and work in day-labor agencies until I have enough for rent." It's worked both times, and relatively straightforward. It would not have worked in SF.
SF does have a program that will help you travel back to Family in other states/cities, but I don't think they can just ship people to a lower cost location
Added bonus, those who are capable of getting back on their feet can actually afford to live there afterwards instead of endlessly cycling through welfare cliffs.
You could get a lot of the (arguable) benefits with less transportation costs and a whole lot fewer political/legal problems by doing it in, say, Merced County.
Not spending the money needed to house and treat people.
Are you including reduced negative externalities? If so, how does that jibe with how awful things are in Tenderloin?
From slightly later in the article.
In LA, they have spent $5B on the approach since 2016, and are now entertaining a proposal to spend $837K per unit. They are building about 200 units a year, and there are over 40,000 homeless people in LA.
https://economicprism.com/feeding-las-homeless-industrial-co...
Harm Reduction is a sham, its why SF is the way it is.
Simply giving people access to free needles does nothing for the actual problems - unabated drug use.
As a nation, we seemingly don’t have the will to spend money on these kinds of wraparound services except in the context of our prisons, which are a very poor substitute for housing and healthcare while costing way more.
We could get so much more done per dollar with housing + actual supportive care, institutionalization for those unable to live in that kind of environment without harming others, and finally, reserve prison for those who society must actually be protected from.
https://newbooksnetwork.com/juha-kaakinen-homelessness-a-sol...
There's a shorter presentation as a TEDx Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/juha_kaakinen_give_me_a_home_not_a... https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ukKbSNXXMhk
The Y-Foundation site:
'Housing First' literally implies a 'Second' and 'Third' issue to be addressed.
It gets called cutesy names like "Housing First" to dupe people into supporting it.
The idea is that welfare programs don't help homeless people that much - because without some base of stability (a place to stay) - they are permanently uprooted and can't connect in any meaningful way with civilization.
i.e. try to 'get a job', if you're homeless. Even if you could - how do you get a bank account? A cell phone? Literally just 'take a shower' and 'brush your hair'?
If you have a 'home base' - then you can get a 'footing' into the system.
It works quite well when the other layers of social assistance are there, this approach was validated in Finland.
If you just give a drug addict a home and walk away, then it will not work.
If you are homeless because you lost your job and have no money and got evicted (which basically doesn't happen in San Francisco anyway with the eviction moratorium), you can get help. You can find a shelter and food and basic services to give you the stability required to start rebuilding.
Those resources rarely fill up, because most of the homeless people still on the street aren't willing to obey the rules of those places.
The "Housing First" places are specifically housing that doesn't require you to care about putting down the drugs or stopping destroying stuff or caring about having a better future.
SF enacted massive taxes to basically do this and it does nothing but waste money and drive businesses out of San Francisco.