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Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Well the companies behind homeless shelters have an opportunity to do the same, yet are not.

Companies? They're usually scrappy nonprofits that don't have much in the way of funds, compared to the prison-industrial complex bankrolled by state governments.

In cities like New York and San Fran the homeless non-profit sector is a billion dollar industry, bankrolled by city and state governments, with many shady characters pulling in millions of dollars a year.

>This year, the city has directed $2.6 billion to nonprofits to operate homeless shelters, and officials already know they have a problem with some of them. Nine of the 62 groups that run shelters are on an internal city watch list for issues that include conflicts of interest and financial problems, according to records reviewed by The Times. All of them continue to receive city funding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/nyregion/jack-brown-homel...

The state of California funnels more than $3 billion dollars a year into these homeless non-profits while cities like San Fran funnel hundreds of millions more - without doing much of anything to mitigate, much less solve, the homeless crisis there.

https://sfstandard.com/public-health/the-standard-top-25-san...

This is absurd. With that kind of funding the city could build pretty good homes for the entire homeless population in just a few years. Stable living conditions is the first step to get your life in order.

More than absurd, it is completely corrupt. Unfortunately many people are operate under the false assumption that the homeless are slipping through the cracks because we aren't "devoting enough resources to the problem". Like most of our problems, the volume of money we throw at it isn't the issue. The issue is how that money is spent and who gets to decide how we spend it. New York City spends $38 billion dollars a year on "education" - over $30,000 per student. Despite this massive spending, more than half of NYC public school students were not proficient in reading or math (and this is data from 2019 - before the lockdowns - these numbers have gotten dramatically worse).

https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/new-york/districts/new-...

If consider multiple billions as 'don't have much in the way of funds'...

Private Prisons make this to increase their "customers", or the funds the receive. Do you believe that homeless shelters would like to increase homelessness, or are in competition with private prisons for persons ending up in their facility?

It's weird people aren't talking about this. CA alone spends multiple billions every year on homelessness, bans private prisons, and has the worst homelessness situation. Yet we're supposed to believe that the dominant force behind homeless policy is private prisons?

This is an absolutely hilarious comment.

Why don't the homeless people lobby? They have every right to too!

> They have every right to

  "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to                                
  sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their                                    
  bread." -- Anatole France

More on-topic, I think Afghanistan, with its factions of warlords would be a good model to look forward to for any nation that erodes the foundation of the Rule of Law by privatising institutions of criminal justice and so regressing State monopoly on violence to whichever thugs with the most guns and manpower are willing to take someone's buck.

Homeless shelters count on the invisible hand of free market.

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