Salesforce Benioff warns he may pull conference from SF over homelessness drug | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce Benioff warns he may pull conference from SF over homelessness drug

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29 pointsshaburn34 comments

The way homelessness has been tackled in Finland is by offering free housing, no string attached, to homeless people.

I think there is a culture of "but people need to deserve it", and I guess because housing is so expensive in San Francisco it might seem like it's unfair that homeless people get free housing whereas someone with a job needs to spend 50% of their pay in housing. But if you want the problem to be solved, this seems to be way to go about it.

Of course, governments need to also provide programs for reinsertion and rehabilitation, but people need the stability while they recover which is a process that will be full of ups and downs. For these people any barrier might be too high. So I think the rest of us need to come to terms with "giving away free stuff", that's just what works.

Free housing for the homeless, no strings attached.

> offering free housing, no string attached, to homeless people

What if everyone wants their free housing in Helsinki? California's problem isn't a lack of homes per se, it's a lack of homes where people want to live. (San Francisco also has a massive drug-use enforcement problem.)

Should we make decisions based on the what-ifs of the helsinkiläinen or reality?

> Should we make decisions based on the what-ifs of the helsinkiläinen or reality?

What works for Finland might not for California without us acknowledging that every homeless person who wants housing in San Francisco isn’t entitled to it. They can be entitled to housing. But not where they want it.

One challenge there is that many of the factors driving the location wants aren't entirely unreasonable: That "want" to live in proximity to the VA hospital that will provide them the medical services they need, they "want" to live in proximity to family members they can get (or sadly, often harass) some support out of. They "want" to live in a place where a poor ability to manage themselves and/or their substance addictions won't result in a quick death from exposure (or arrest).

You should acknowledge the differences, because scale matters.

Finland is a bitterly cold country (in winter) with a hard to understand language and 5 million people. The local homelessness problem has some relatively low upper limit.

The US is a country of over 300 million and SF has very good weather all year round. Its migration potential is almost two orders of magnitude bigger.. If you simply give a home to everyone who turns up in SF and says that they need it, you won't have enough homes. You could deny coverage to anyone who moves to SF after a certain date; that would mitigate the "amount of homes needed" problem, but it remains to be seen if the homeless community does not grow back to its original size.

There are 4 vacant apartments for every homeless person in San Francisco, including those in shelters. The idea of a net shortage is a farce.

> 4 vacant apartments for every homeless person in San Francisco, including those in shelters

Source? (Curious for their definition of vacancy.)

A cursory glance shows many of those homes are being renovated or sold [1]. The pied-à-terre / vacancy tax isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s a band-aid on a missing limb. (Though further penalising housing development seems like a very San Francisco way to compound the problem.)

[1] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/san-francisco-saw-bi...

So if they all got clean and worked 32h a day they could easily afford housing. To work these hours little crystal never fails. The insanity might be baked into a insane situation. Even the Romans housed there slaves..

Do you have people from all over Europe heading to Finland for the free housing? From what I can tell, a big portion of the Bay Area's problems have to do with more and more people heading there, knowing that they won't be punished for drug use or the petty crimes they commit to fuel their habit, and a relatively moderate climate.

It really is quite shocking the changes in just the last decade. There seems to be some misguided belief that if you just stop punishing folks with drug problems they'll somehow "come out of it" and rejoin society as functioning members after some revelation. That's just not ever going to happen IMO.

It’s a great story, and maybe has some truth, but long before drugs were legalized everyone bussed their homeless to the big cities. The problem was here before the legalization.

Right... which is why I said it's gotten significantly worse and didn't say the problem didn't exist a decade ago. There is a direct correlation to the increase in open drug use and crime in the bay area with the decriminalization of drug use and petty theft. If you're arguing otherwise, I guess I'd question whether or not you live in the area or spend any significant time there.

I don’t know that there is good evidence of “more and more people” going to SF to be homeless and use drugs. There may be more homeless now, and there may be more open drug use, but the motivation and agency doesn’t necessarily follow.

> there is a culture of "but people need to deserve it", and I guess because housing is so expensive

Housing doesn't have to be complex or extravagant. A single homeless person could thrive in a small 1-bedroom studio with a kitchenette with their own shower, etc. Many hotel-style residences would be suitable for this purpose.

A key factor will be locating this in a place that doesn't feel like a concentration camp and putting it near the city center with working public transportation so they can access employment options.

They can help "pay" for it via optional community programs for housekeeping, landscaping, trash removal, and so on. Many homeless individuals will not take handouts because of pride and they don't want to feel any more of a failure than they do.

It'll be better than being homeless, but not as good as having your own place (paid for by your own income).

Sounds great but there would need to be a no drug policy in this housing. Otherwise, these places will just become drug dens.

No drugs and mental health and drug counseling with job placement would be the dream situation.

The problem is, what jobs? There just aren't jobs for people of that sort. Those days are gone

I think they tried that in SF and it did not work at all. There's definitely a subset of the homeless population that would take advantage of something like that, but my guess is that those people are not really a problem to begin with. In other words the people that could take a free apartment and then turn their lives around are probably not defecating on the streets and shooting drugs in broad daylight. If you take the latter and give them an apartment it's only going to exacerbate their bad habits. The biggest problem that happens to overlap with homelessness is all kinds of illnesses from addiction to mental issues, and those are not being addressed. These problems are confused with lack of housing for some reason, and then the problem just never gets actually solved.

The state of California alone has 8 times your population and the US will gain your entire population in refugees in less than a decade.

Defo got my click to find out about this novel "homelessness drug"!

Sorry.

SF spends ~$1B/y on homelessness with little to show for it. Maybe they need to invest in more SROs on the outskirts and/or a federal declaration of a disaster including voluntary resettlement with comprehensive support. It's too big of an issue to solve at the local level, and it's too expensive to solve in the most expensive areas.

The question you should be asking is how much is actually going to the homeless. A homelessness "tribunal" or whatever has a financial interest is keeping just enough homelessness around to keep their jobs. This isn't uncommon with other government projects and anyone who has been a contractor can attest to that. If they got homelessness to some absurdly low number surely the state would start to cut jobs.

I would imagine applying Occam's Razor here would show that there's likely a significant amount of corruption in a program designed to solve something like homelessness. It's JUST vague enough that you can manufacture all sorts of reasons to keep the federal dollars flowing in.

"Corruption" is your first instinct? I would suspect inefficiency of service delivery before outright theft or embezzlement. (Unless Mr. of Sen. Feinstein were involved.)

There used to be many more SROs in the city. https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/

> S.R.O.’s, including residential hotel units and rooming houses, may have numbered as high as 90,000 in San Francisco at the inception of the 1930’s, meaning they were nearly as prevalent as apartments. By the early 1990’s the number of S.R.O. units in San Francisco had been reduced dramatically, to approximately 20,000.

I think Homeless is really a keyword for spending on <10,000 of the 750k+ people in SF who are X% target beneficiaries of those funds. Y% recipients dictate based on this <2% of the population.

It certainly explains status quo - SF spends ~$57k per homeless person per year, yet is somehow unable to "solve" it despite that amount being more than median household income in this country.

Demonstrably whatever the city is doing with money has nothing to do with solving homelessness.

I think it's all about incentives and right now the current policies are completely oblivious to them. You need to deter people from even thinking about living outside. Just make it inconvenient. This may seem cruel at first but I think it discourages those who may have some alternatives left in their lives, maybe a relative or something like that. Once the system makes it inconvenient and deters people from certain risky life choices, those who are left will be a more manageable number of people to help out. I don't really know the details here but it's sure something that is not considered enough and instead everyone defaults to housing.

Do you really think it is convenient being homeless? The majority of people who are homeless have experienced levels of abuse, often beginning at a very young age, that are unimaginable to your average “well-adjusted” person. How high functioning do you think you would be if you were constantly beaten and raped as a child; if you were raised in an unstable environment full of constant violence; if you were exposed to addiction at a very young age? These things lead to severe mental illness – many homeless people, for instance, have been in states of constant psychosis for so long that it is nearly impossible for them to organize their thoughts enough to complete even basic tasks. Some people are so far gone that no amount of mental health support would help them.

You argue that the policies are ignorant of incentives; I’d argue that you are ignorant of how truly differently a vast portion of the homeless population experience their existence on this planet. Your mental model of the incentives doesn’t apply to a population who don’t function the same way you do. It is not convenient being homeless, and making it even more difficult will not solve anything.

> Your mental model of the incentives doesn’t apply to a population who don’t function the same way you do

We all function the same, we're all human. It comes down to how much do we want to prevent people from spiraling down in the first place. If the laws were enforced and it was socially unacceptable to tolerate homelessness, then I think many people would look for alternatives at any cost. This would then expose those who truly have no other options. Instead what we have now is enablement of that lifestyle, at least implicitly by allowing it, but also explicitly in many cities by subsidizing it. This makes it into a viable option for many who would rather take the risk than seek for help as soon as possible.

If homelessness is so bad, why do we leave people to their own demise? Even with free housing it's not enough for many who struggle mentally, as you are pointing out. If someone is drowning they need to be forced out of the water instead of doing nothing because dragging them would hurt their arm.

The "stick" must come with a survivable "carrot". How does Japan do it? Perhaps make it illegal to be homeless but then with a mandate of comprehensive support services to eliminate rough sleeping and permanent shelter living?

https://archive.is/K2Wj1

Just build free housing for the homeless. Build a large camp style rehab center. If you’re sleeping on the street you get arrested and get a choice to go to one of these two places. These homeless bums are currently provided with housing but since they can’t shoot you there they refuse to use them.

> Build a large camp style rehab center.

I don't think the homeless deserves to be corralled up in one place like cattle.

One of the best ways to help the homeless become less homeless is to firstly make them feel like a functioning human being again. Treat the issue (poverty, unemployment, depression, lack of self-worth) itself, not the symptom (homelessness, drug use).

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