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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

This reads as a political ad, not a news story.

The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, there's people Newsom appointed. Don't just get me riled up, tell me what's actually going on so that I can inform myself of how to fix this. Don't just say this is a problem and point a singular finger talking about large sums of money, break it down. Tell me why homeless decreased in SF and Orange but increased in LA, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego[0]. Tell me why it skyrocketed since 2016, starting with Brown and then accelerated under Newsom[1]. Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues that NY and CA aren't.

Do some investigation. Distill expert information to me. Be a news article, not a political ad.

[0] https://www.ppic.org/blog/homeless-populations-are-rising-ar...

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles...

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How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population?

It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.

It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.

Similar to what I've seen in HI. I imagine there would be more in HI if it didn't cost an expensive plane ticket.

There are. And they're vastly undercounted. Au contraire, the HI govt often deports the homeless off the island

SF and further north are hardly nice weather locations.

Define nice weather. If we are talking winters with temperatures consistently over 0C (32F), little to no snow, seattle and portland are great for winter.

Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.

SF isn’t a tropical paradise, but temperature extremes that cause death aren’t very common.

But relative to a lot of the US-- Chicago, New York.. it is very survivable.

Definitely, the winter I visited Mountain View it was 2C (35F) and ground frost.

I think above freezing in winter might generally be considered nice weather.

I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be.

1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...

The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.

West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.

East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.

In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.

It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.

I'm not first-hand familiar with Oregon, but some parts of Washington have moderate temps. Coastal Washington gets a lot of rain but rarely freezes and -- anecdotally -- at least one city in Coastal Washington has vastly worse rates of homelessness on a per capita basis than some of the cities infamous for it, like Seattle and SF. And, yes, they are mostly camped outside, not in shelters.

Which city? I was in Spokane recently (obviously not the coastal city you are speaking about) and was surprised by how full of homeless people downtown was.

Olympia?

West coast winters are very mild, and there is very little humidity. We had a few days that got below freezing last year, most days were over 40.

If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)

The coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has mild weather all year, better than many parts of California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit in a rain shadow.

If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.

Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain. Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up in the fall.

West of the Cascades, it's mild. To the east of them the climate is decidedly less mild, though, so I'd be interested to see how the numbers would compare between the two regions.

The coast is relatively mild compared to inline Oregon or Washington, but winters are still wet and cold (especially in Washington).

> inline

"inland," sorry.

Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.

I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.

Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.

And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.

I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.

I don't personally mind the idea of not being able to buy a house. That's not a thing I'm interested in anyway.

But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.

The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?

There are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.

Yes quite. But we were contemplating a future where small scale landlords were extinct.

Why would they go extinct though? This makes no sense.

Yes, absolutely true. I wasn't really saying that not being able to buy a house is a good thing, but I did speak before thinking here.

There are things besides individual citizens and corporations that could, in theory, own and rent housing.

Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given that California is essentially governed by a single party, it is subject to corruption and inefficiency.

Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1]. All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is not homeless.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/a-builder-convert...

This is my fear for the country as well as the republicans are (in my opinion you can disagree) at the very least partially going crazy. We desperately need at least two parties working for a good government. California needs more checks and balances, and so does the country.

I 100% agree. If you want to run for office here is San Francisco you need to be democrat. Which means that you need to be very nice to people which you know they are not good.

On the other hand one really cannot be republican because of things like this: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/anti-trans-repub...

> Given that California is essentially governed by a single party

Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.

> All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why.

Who: landowners.

How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and then using rent to capture money that should be going to said working class via wages and welfare.

Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and have the political influence to make it happen.

Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much overnight.

LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point, and it's regressive. Throw in some 0% base rate progressive income taxes, pigouvian taxes, maybe a small vat and you're on the right track.

> LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point

The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.

> and it's regressive

It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).

Meanwhile:

> VAT

That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.

With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.

Most Americans own their home. Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land. LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.

> Most Americans own their home

Yes, but the vast majority of that equity is in the house itself, not in the land underneath it. On top of that, land in the suburbs is not as valuable as, say, land in Downtown (which is a big part of why the house itself is most of the value of a typical home).

> Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land.

Maybe not directly, but indirectly the vast majority of their wealth boils down to land. Every skyscraper, every warehouse, every factory, every mall, all those consume large swaths of typically-valuable land. In short:

> LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.

It would mostly fall on whomever owns the most land value - and that is overwhelmingly massive corporations and rich people. A middle class homeowner owns a tiny amount of land value in comparison - certainly far below their equal share, and therein lies the rub: 100% LVT disbursed directly, evenly, and entirely as UBI serves as a self-balancing system:

- If you own less land value than your equal share, you're paid for it

- If you own more land value than your equal share, you pay for it

That's purely theoretical (it's kind of the spherical frictionless cow of Georgist economics), but it should nonetheless illustrate that homeowners will in the vast majority of cases come out vastly ahead under LVT+UBI. Put simply: unless you own a single-family home in Downtown SF, replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT and getting back any surplus as UBI is in your best financial interest.

How much of the cost was just the process of getting all the permits? Looking at this crazy toilet in SF that cost $1.25m after the toilet itself was donated: https://abc7news.com/sf-bathrooms-noe-valley-public-toilet-1...

This parses as "I don't know what's wrong but I know it's the Democrats" which isn't exactly insightful nor helpful.

Well, responsibility is what you get when you're in charge. It's axiomatically correct even if it isn't necessarily helpful (in the sense that there's no guarantee that a counterfactual republican California would have done any better).

I do not think it is Democrat. It think it is because it is one party state.

Exactly. As much as Republicans and Democrats may not want to admit it, we need each other for accountability.

We need viable political choices with incentives to compete on something other than alienating voters who would be expected to vote for the other side for accountability (which mostly means we need proportional representation.)

That is not the same as needing the opposing party in America’s duopolistic system.

Easier said than done.

Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll most likely find what you're looking for...

Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.

Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.

This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".

Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.

Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.

I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.

That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much less on the problem.

Draw your own conclusions...

It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places-- what is their sampling methods, etc?

I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.

Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you can’t fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.

The reporter did exactly what their job is and it is not to figure out reality from competing sources of truth.

You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do the digging and track why they're homeless, what they have done (and what has been done to them), look at program projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have gone up, some aren't, but there's tons of data (and governments are probably already tracking major portions of it).

Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.

17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

> I’ll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.

Wrong.

The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.

The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts and distorting them into untruths.

We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.

I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.

My family and I were having a chaotic political argument about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk about a specific event or general ideas about what should happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000 miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things should be in the abstract.

Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.

I was at Wood St in Oakland, CA.

I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.

I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it. Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals

They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.

"alternate religions" implies there are real religions. How does that work?

You’ve correctly identified the issues with media today. Rage inducing articles are easier to read and get more views. As soon as you introduce facts then very quickly it becomes a nuanced debate on the issue which is far less interesting because and worth less revenue.

We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material.

I don’t know what those regulations would look like. But without them we are drowning in material that does society more harm than good.

Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a panel where people could ask them questions. I asked them, given that journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why does the business model instead align on advertising?

The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.

Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:

1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.

2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.

And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.

Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.

So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.

The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.

I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures.

As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.

We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.

Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.

Or, hear me out, make similar comments as mine and use your economic leverage. We've been trying to push for regulations and stuff for decades, it hasn't been working. I'm not saying stop, I'm saying that the strategy needs to be rethought.

Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can have politics about things that you know about, anything less is tribalism.

You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight nor are you going to be able to march into the president's office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This is the power you have at the individual level. You are part of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is all connected.

Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy. Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or they censor. Both are effective.

Real data is not fashionable anymore to report. Same in health care and education. Tell me where all the f...ing money goes and why it's going up all the time. Don't single out one bad player but provide a full breakdown. That's what journalists should be doing.

Serious answer: there is no need to be fully transparent. The majority of voters don't vote that way.

The chronically homeless I encounter in SF are primarily (not all) 1. Addicted to drugs 2. Suffering from psychiatric issues. No amount of affordable housing is going to fix that. No amount of training, educational assistance, universal income etc will fix that. They are not in any condition to work or hold a job or do personal health maintenance. Give them shelter and they wonder off.

Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes are being spent on housing. These are people that are not homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor. Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing."{1}

Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population relative to the rest of the country.

The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to promote them and receive money for them despite their inability to get results. That is were all the money goes.

{1}https://flhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Good-News-f...

Just for the record Florida's incarceration rate is rather high so that might also be why there are fewer homeless.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html#:~:text=Florid....

It is multi causal.

Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]

But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl in the populace. [1][2]

So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie. chronic) homelessness.

[1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#:~:text=To%20get%20mo...

[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/

[3] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransi...

> Were there leaky buckets

Oh, yes. Some samples:

1. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/city-audit-finds-...

2. https://thefrisc.com/sf-has-fought-homelessness-with-no-bid-...

3. https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-homeless-nonprofit-housin...

This is common knowledge for folks in the Bay Area.

California has a housing crisis and there is no political will to fix it. Not wanting low cost housing in your neighborhood is something that unites people very strongly across the political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_housing_shortage

The implication that there is a Boogeyman political system that doesn't want to house the homeless in their neighborhood is suspect and laughter inducing. Politicians need the will of the people to persist.

It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.

i'm pretty sure that's what the op was saying.

Why the homeless move to CA

Good climate

Cities provide cash payments to them

Legal marijuana

Open air drug markets

Soft on crime prosecutors

Liberal population that wants to provide for them

Note: I make no judgement value on any of these items, just proposing reasons

- Good climate: Absolutely. It's much tougher being homeless in the winter in Chicago than it is in California.

- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.

- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]

- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.

- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?

Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.

[1] https://disa.com/maps/marijuana-legality-by-state

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/map-how-many-homeless-americ...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

Legal weed as you are not going to get arrested for possession friend, not where they buy it.

lol, if that's the only thing you've got on a homeless person, you need to move along.

How are any of these things I've got on homeless people? They are just reasons they congregate in California. Strange, no need to be glib.

Not you, haha, I meant if weed is the only thing a police officer can find then it feels like a false pretense for arrest. I liked your response tbh, I didn’t catch what you mentioned initially.

fair enough :)

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction.

Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.

If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.

There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem.

The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...

15% of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. That statistic means almost 1 in 5 right off the top need long term medical care. "Mere housing" won't do jack for those people.

Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.

We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.

We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.

We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.

The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.

If it was just a matter of house prices, why isn't California's homelessness solved by cheaper homes in Fresno or other parts of the state? I can't help but feel there's more to it than cheaper housing.

Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people.

You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.

[0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...

Finland already has universal healthcare, no? Don't remove that from your calculations.

You can't really be homeless in Finland during winter for very long though.

I think if you give someone a house they are definitionally no longer homeless, even if they remain mentally ill or addicted to drugs.

I think the fallacy you're making is assuming all homeless have the same problems. There are definitely some homeless or near-homeless people where having a safe place to sleep, shower, and store their belongings will allow them to hold a job long enough to get back on their feet. There are others that need serious rehab. There are others that need mental health counseling. There are others that will never be able to care for themselves and need to be put in a care home.

So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.

The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable.

The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.

(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)

> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.

It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.

So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.

That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.

> So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.

These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.

> These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.

You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."

And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?

Everyone wants cheaper stuff. The question is how to allocate limited resources.

Everyone wants that solution. No one wants that solution in their neighborhood. Even unsubsidized low cost housing.

> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]

I'm not sure I completely agree with that.

Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?

You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.

But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.

They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.

A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.

Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.

can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"

That makes sense, thanks.

They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.

It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build.

Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:

Where do you put them?

For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).

So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.

But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.

And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.

And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.

Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.

I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc).

It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.

I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex.

It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?

I understand such people may be particularly fragile. But the rest of us move for a job all the time.

San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.

I think this is a misleading description of the situation.

Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.

> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.

> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...

I think you snipping away important context from your quote is a misleading description.

> According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ...

So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.

I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city.

Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.

Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.

You think it's reasonable to think they imprisoned people in hotel rooms? You are also willing to take some "advocates" word for it? How about you provide evidence it did happen. It certainly did not. And what does that mean the majority were able to exit into long term housing? Having a bunched of wrecked property and then moving people to new property to destroy is not a success.

Guilty of not reading the article yet - even the headline reads like a political ad.

I think you are equating the fact that most elected officials in CA are Democratic to this being a political hit piece. With that logic, is anything negative about our largely Democrat body of officials off limits?

> California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in,

Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless problem to other states and also do so figuratively by criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.

If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to your state, all other things being equal.

This isn’t, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that California has some very successful industries that reward a narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both not adequately increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity better for the general good.)

[0] Not simple policy problems to resolve, the housing one for political reasons, the improving distribution without killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.

> Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem?

No, quite the contrary: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

It sounds like you're asking for a whole book. That's valuable, but not every newspaper story can be that in-depth.

California's homelessness problem is not caused by other states offloading their homeless to California.

I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very much be net importing homeless from many of the other states that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading their homelessness problem).

I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.

Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).

>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"

I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).

I certainly agree that how you spend money could just encourage people to become homeless, I’d hoped to convey that idea by talking about percentage increases in the homeless population, since not every new homeless is going to be a transplant. I wish there were better guides as to what spending actually helps. I suspect soup kitchens are a general positive good, but they may only make it easier to be homeless by allieviating some of the pain. I personally think access to housing should be a basic constitutional right, but I’m also weary of things like projects and tenements which may purpetuate more problems than they help.

But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.

Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/

In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And considering the obvious issue of California being one of the most expensive places to live on the continent, it seems like quite a stretch.

There is an important phrase in economics, “all other things being equal”. That phrase covers the idea that if you chose another state that was equally expensive as california, and was equavalent in every other aspect, then this one difference would have this expected effect. You are correct that I don’t have emperical evidence to cite, and it would be a very very difficult experiment to run on a state level. But economists definitely try to run these kinds of experiments trying to find as similar as possible locals to try to answer the kinds of questions as “do changes in spending attract things that the money are spent on?”.

Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.

As others have pointed out, the problem has many sources. Other states/cities busing their homeless to California has historically been at least a minor contributor. California won a suit against the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, for specifically the practice of closing a psychiatric hospital, placing its freshly unhoused patients on Greyhound buses to Sacramento or San Francisco with one-way tickets, and giving the patients instructions to "call 911" when they arrive. [1]. 24 persons were documented and cared for by San Francisco specifically, but allegedly Nevada's largest mental health hospital did this with approximately 500 people.

1 - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tent...

Ok..then what is it caused by? Provide your sources.

There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.

CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)

There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.

There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.

Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)?

Edit: I dug up some data:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.

> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.

Two words: Federal Support.

If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder it. And the federal government is just that, the collective power of all states combined.

Exactly. The logistics may not be simple (i.e. actually getting the federal government's support) but the logic should be obvious: piecemeal support results in the ones that are doing the most to help get "penalized" with more people seeking help.

>What is the solution to that?

So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.

The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.

California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.

What you describe is what happens in Canada. Most homeless in Canada end up in Vancouver, because of weather and assistance offered. The other provinces, with the 6 months freezing winter, not as much assistance, and I think a bit of enforcement, causes the homeless to end up at Vancouver.

If it is caused by other states, that would indicate the problem is not uniquely California related, making the likely necessary solutions to be federal.

If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate that the problem is something happening in California, and maybe a state level solution is best.

You have to start the solution in the right place to have any hope of addressing the root cause.

Good luck getting the federal government to do anything to help a coastal state that isn't already covered by the executive branch.

I don't think the frame of "does this help or hurt a particular state" is a useful frame for the problem.

We should look at it as "does this help or hurt people"

It’s a warm climate with large cities which provide sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless over other avenues of living

Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali over Canada for the winter. California also provides massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless

These aren’t exhaustive reasons why, but it’s a core part of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to address complicated social problems head on and instead virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester

I’m not going to provide you with sources. It’s too politicized of a subject. If you don’t want to accept it for being this way i’ve learned not to argue. But at the very least if people really can’t see why this problem exists as it does, here an entry

Your argument is that an immigrant would rather be homeless in the US than housed in their home country?

Almost no data backs that up.

lol people would rather be poor in the US than mexico yes.

your dichotomy is a false representation. and a poor one at that

You think people choose to be fucked up? And what's the solution here, shoot the homeless?

Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society, poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).

people who take this emotional and illogical approach is exactly why the homeless suffer to the extent they do

stop virtue signaling and start thinking or kindly avoid this topic because you’re only causing harm

Why do they live in SF and further north if it's for weather?

That's a useful answer to one of the questions the article did not answer. Now, do you have a reliable source?

> Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues ...

Wait, what?

Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.

ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).

A really good and fair story about the problems, including problems with government, law enforcement, neighbors and the unhoused themselves is "City of Tents"

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1156698343/city-of-tents-vetera...

Texas and Oklahoma openly bus their homeless to L.A. Rick Perry (former governor of Texas) openly bragged about it during his presidential campaign.

An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority coming from Texas.

Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was homeless upon arrival.)

L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

I'm not sure that LAHSAs homeless count is a good source of data. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-24/doubts-r...

I don’t know how relevant this story is to the question of whether people who are homeless in California are from California.

In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.

If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.

When even the LAT is calling out LAHSA's numbers, you know that they can't be trusted...

That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.

I mean what did you expect from an article from the Murdoch owned rag of WSJ that is essentially Fox News with a little sheen on it.

Inadequate reporting is not a partisan or ideological issue.

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