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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of benefits for both individuals affected and society at large when you have programs for housing the homeless:

https://believehousing.org.au/housing/how-housing-benefits-p...

You can think of housing for the homeless as prison for the homeless.. without the additional costs of guards, high walls, profits to private prison owners and kickbacks to politicians.

Also a better chance of better outcomes for many, raising taxes from those that pay taxes (over and above those who are homeless but also have jobs and pay taxes .. (yes, they're a thing)).

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I cannot shake the feeling that the bulk of those social benefits could be captured by offering a very compact "cage-home" like storage closet, that can be locked and allows sleeping and storing one's valuables, with access to bathroom and a minimal food preparation areas.

Nobody should be forced to sleep rough, in the cold and dirt, where they are vulnerable to rapes, theft and beatings, such a life turns the kindest soul into an animal. 20 sq. feet of lockable closet with a mattress and shelves to store one's minimal belongings could mean maintaining their humanity and preventing turning them into dangerous criminals.

This would be so cheap to offer that it could be a basic human right, I would certainly pay taxes for it before other stupidities promoted as measures against crime. It's definitely not an incentive to be poor, those who can afford can rent a larger space, it would be a minimal guaranteed, free baseline: no matter how bad you fail in life, you will still get to be treated like a human being.

Cage homes are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_homes_in_Hong_K...

So are/were cage hotels; further in that page,

> A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security

and more at http://historyapolis.com/blog/tag/cage-hotel/ ).

> Cage hotels emerged in Minneapolis in the late 19th century, as a way to house the migrant laborers who came to the city to find work and then to stay while they spent their earnings from the railroads, the farms and the logging camps. By 1895, there were 50 cage hotels in Minneapolis. While these hotels provided a cheap place to stay, the rest of Minneapolis found them increasingly distasteful. The city outlawed new cage hotels in 1918, but they were such an established institution that some of them lasted for four more decades.

The flophouse WP entry points out: "gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit"

However, that skips over how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago.

Yes, that's exactly the model I'm referencing.

> how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago

That's easy to explain: exclusionary zoning, maximum density requirements, aesthetic rules etc are all forms of selection based on social status. Class and racial lines are strong and people strongly want to keep the "character" of their area, i.e to live near people of comparable social status.

It’s so weird to me that this is a near-universal definition of “character” because every neighborhood I’ve ever been in that’s segregated by class has been absolutely miserable and boring.

"The sound of gentrification is silence" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-bro...

That would be effective and cheap, but also illegal in most places because of building codes. Eg https://reason.com/video/2016/12/09/los-angeles-homeless-tin...

> The city owns thousands of vacant lots, many of which have been abandoned for decades, that could provide sites for tiny house villages or other innovative housing concepts that can have an immediate impact.

Sad and deliberate. We have more than enough to expansively build houses for everyone, but we don't simply to make a few richer.

We have an excess of seacans (ocean shipping containers) in America. Slip a molded, insulated, stainless steel shell into it, designed for wash-out. Provide community kitchen/toilet facilities, and community storage facilities. Make it easy to move to a different cluster of seacan shelter, so that people can find their community. Provide a lot of social services to these communities, help people get over their addictions and traumas.

Speaking of trauma, we’ve had quite a few global-scale mass human death events this past few generations. Every family has experienced a hugely traumatizing society-destroying event within the past four generations. World wars. Genocides. Civil war. Social revolutions.

These are experiences that fundamentally wreck a lot of people. They come back or live through it, and end up broken. Maybe they withdraw, maybe they get angry or violent, maybe they let their kids run wild, maybe they are too restrictive — in the end the family suffers trauma and society suffers from their trauma.

Little wonder, then, that we have addiction and behavioural problems up the wazoo.

exactly. I'd be willing to contribute to humane encouragement into such a scheme. I would no doubt also include free health care and a robust detox and addiction and psyche programs.

i believe that, ironically, the less progressive jurisdictions already provide this service while the more "progressive" districts have not yet made it mandatory.

If you look at actual programs to house homeless people in practice, prison is a bargain. In Portland a charitable estimate to house 1/3 of the homeless is 320k/unit to build + 20k/year/unit to maintain.

Shack-based safe rest villages (temporary transitional housing) are $30+k/unit. https://www.portland.gov/ryan/funding-safe-rest-villages but it is taboo to have barriers, so sometimes they have to be shut down because they are too dangerous. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/05/28/old-town-homeless...

Do not underestimate the homeless industrial complex.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2018/09/07/one-cost-estimate...

The cost of living is, indeed, incredibly high. It's no wonder there are so many homeless.

What would our society look like if we didn't allow the greed of property owners to displace people from the opportunity to sleep indoors?

No matter what, there is a cost to homelessness. Most people expect that cost to be paid by the homeless themselves; after all, that's the status quo.

Those who can't afford a home, by definition, can't pay for homelessness. That's literally the problem. The only possible solution is someone else paying. Anything else is just ignorance.

The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.

Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care, including addiction care. There are a lot of options for people before they end up on the street (including moving to lower cost of living areas, which is what most people do rather than become homeless), and there are a lot of supportive options for people where the primary barrier is income, rather than inability to manage one’s own affairs.

The status quo is that blue cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year encouraging homelessness while blocking the development of new housing, while people who have their shit together need to deal with random violence, open drug abuse, lack of access to parks and sidewalks, and all of the other problems that come with running an open-air asylum for years without respite.

This morning on my way to work I had to walk in the middle of the road (sidewalk was covered by tents - the city is being sued because it is a real ADA issue), try to avoid second-hand smoke of what appeared to be meth but maybe was fentanyl, and step over human feces, all while watching out for needles. The sidewalks are soaked with urine which unfortunately isn’t washed away in the relatively dry summers. I have to keep my head on a swivel because people randomly test you; last week I saw someone being chased by a crazed person through downtown, a week before that someone tried but failed to suckerpunch a passer by, and earlier this summer we had a cherished member of the community randomly killed while waiting for the bus (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/07/murder-charge-now-f...). There are several similar stories this year. I’ve lived in Portland coming on two years, and even as a tall man, I have been chased, followed, lunged at, called expletives, witnessed several crimes, and had a mentally I’ll person try to run me down with their car, running until I eventually found a police officer to intervene.

Homelessness is not just a cost of living issue. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/terri-zinze...

> The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.

> Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care...

Hence the increased cost of housing such a person.

Is there waste in these programs from greed and politics? Definitely. Would a perfect implementation that completely avoids that greed match the market rate? I doubt it.

When you buy or rent a home, you generally must provide evidence that you are a stable reliable person; both to illustrate your ability to make regular payments, and to prove you won't become a nuisance to your neighbors, which would ultimately introduce its own cost.

Mental health is core to the issue of homelessness. Not having a stable home is core to the issue of mental health. Do you see the race condition? This is the part of the algorithm that requires intervention.

We can and should do more to help with mental health, especially in the US. Housing is an integral part of that. It's going to cost a lot. We should definitely do whatever we can to mitigate the greed that inflates that cost, but cost itself isn't enough of Ann excuse to give up on humanity.

How do we prevent these houses from turning into slums?

Build them in wealthy hoods.

How is it going to help?

Slums are a result of factors such as emargination, lack of services, crime and poverty. All factors that are lacking in wealthy hoods. Police actually cares about safety and order when wealthy citizens are at stake.

I don't see how being poor forces people to throw garbage in the streets and pee in the streets.

One thing I can tell after living outside of the USA for some time, is that a couple of unemployed drug addicts can turn an otherwise neat and tidy house into a shithole. And that was a country with a free medical care. Including addiction treatment.

> I don't see how being poor forces people to throw garbage in the streets and pee in the streets.

> a couple of unemployed drug addicts can turn an otherwise neat and tidy house into a shithole.

Thanks for showing us your very progressive view of the poor.

Drug addicts need help and that has nothing to do with housing, same goes for people with mental health issues.

> lack of services

In San Francisco, where I live, all of the “services” (i.e., food banks, check cashing services, shelters, soup kitchens, even the DMV) are in the poor neighborhoods (the Mission). You can’t find any of those services in rich neighborhoods (Noe/Cole Valley).

So, maybe we should keep building affordable housing in poor neighborhoods instead?

I'm talking about having access to good schools, good law enforcement, clean environment, etc. You know, the same quality services people like you receive, as the poor are nothing else but people like you.

Distribute them across cities in mixed income neighbourhoods rather than the US model of post red lining NIMBY isolationism.

Homeless people have a wide demographic, a large number have had employment and professions and seek the stability to re-engage with the workforce.

The notion that all homeless are on a one way spiral into a slum and should be keep out of sight and out of mind is a great part of the underlying issues.

I doubt it, but would be happy to see the data proving the opposite.

Just for comparison, in top-of-the-shelf socialist Sweden there are 30k homeless people per 10 million population. It matches pretty well to 500k of homeless people in the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Sweden

> Distribute them across cities in mixed income neighbourhoods

How is this actually done in practice?

Something like X units per new development are "reserved" for people under certain income limits. It distributes income ranges across geographic regions, rather than concentrating them by unit rental prices.

Here's one example from my neighborhood:

"On Sept. 19, contractors with the Anderson Companies were issued an $8 million construction permit for the foundation and footings of what will be a two-year building project at 411 Lexington Parkway — the 304-unit Lexington Station apartment building, half of which will be designated affordable housing."

https://www.twincities.com/2022/10/10/after-st-pauls-concess...

If you treat the homeless as lepers and stick them at the edge of town - you will get exactly what you said. If however, you create one home for the homeless on every street/block/floor - you'll find out that they are people, just like you and me, and with a little bit of support many of them will even thrive. The US is just so big on NIMBY that there is zero chance of that happening :-(

>end slums

>end homelessness

Unless you can end poverty, pick one.

The thing is, we easily could end poverty. The economic productivity is there. We just don't want to.

Who's we?

Slum would still be better to homeless compared to being without roof. First we need to ensure everyone has somewhere to live.

Where shall you house these homeless people? During the pandemic NYC tried using vacant hotels to house homeless people. Surprise surprise the areas immediately surrounding the hotels turned into a drug and needle playground, and people evacuated. It was an epic disaster.

People with this idea are almost always from the suburbs. Plenty of homeless people are merely down on their luck, but many (most?) others have mental issues or have crippling drug addiction. No one wants that shit near their home or children.

You can certainly try and force it, but you can’t force people to tolerate it. People will just leave, and the nearby areas will turn into a slum.

> People with this idea are almost always from the suburbs.

Or from countries that aren't the US.

If your problem is concentration, then you have to start your solution at scale. It's no wonder that starting small leads to consolidation.

No one wants the obvious solution, so the victims must bear responsibility.

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