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Comment by bongobingo1 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's not unreasonable to attack effects of homelessness as well as the cause. Some problems are really hard and some are just hard.

In other places where it wont cost 1.7M to build one public toilet, this wouldn't be seen as such a failure or mis-step, just extending public services to people in crisis - as long as it's not seen as "fixed" by doing so.

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I think the OP wanted you to consider the benefit that 1.7 million could have had in providing direct aid to preventing homelessness, e.g. rental assistance or job training.

Certainly even an existing residence or office with multiple toilets could be purchased for ≤$1.7M within city limits.

No way in hell you could buy even a small building in the city for the stated purpose of homeless services for anywhere near that amount of money. Anything homeless “attracting” will have you swarmed with NIMBYs and red tape for years. It will be called a crime magnet. People will say that it will reduce property values. They will sue you to stop the project. The one thing everybody agrees on in the public review meeting is that the place to put the homeless is “not near me”. You will spend way more than $1.7m on lawyers alone for a project like this.

I'd think increasing demand would hurt everyone's bottom line, since non-assisted renters have competition with assisted renters for the same set of properties.

Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?

Funneling free money into rent, any way you structure it, will indeed raise prices unless you also build more housing.

Ironically the people fighting the hardest to funnel free money into rent are the same ones fighting the hardest to prevent new housing at all costs, under the delusional theory that "induced demand" means that the law of supply and demand is wrong and the inverse applies.

SF's NIMBY progressives are a weird lot.

The issue is nobody leaning left politically is going to run with the truth that homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse. California still sells the lie that homelessness is caused by lack of housing/affordability.

It can be both. I'd like to see numbers, though. Used to be mental health and drug abuse were by far the dominant cause of rough homelessness. Did the pandemic change that? The homeless population has exploded in many cities in the last couple years. All from crime and drugs?

I could believe that the non-rough sleeping homeless (couch surfers, as it were) are much more likely to be people who cannot afford a place to live.

Also, politically conservative areas still have homeless problems of their own, so it might be premature to declare it a left leaning policy problem.

> homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse

You don't even have correlation let alone causation. California is slightly below average with its incarceration rate so not really lax at all compared to the 20+ states with lower incarceration rates. Alaska has an above average incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate. Nevada has a high incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate.

> and drug abuse

California doesn't even make the top 20 list for states with drug abuse problems. Not surprisingly some conservative states are on that list - thanks most likely to widely available and cheap meth.

You want a reductive answer to a complex problem in order to make an ideological point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/care-coordination/20-s...

I don't feel it was intentended attack on OP's part. It seems he was pointing out that even a workaround for this seems crazy. Despite not really addressing the original problem, but only providing some relief - which still is pretty welcome.

The $1.7M toilet is symptomatic of the root cause of homelessness in the Bay Area: you can't build anything within a reasonable time and budget there, even something as simple and small-footprint as a toilet.

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