Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-....
says $57k per person.
$57K, https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.
1) homeless will want this, and move by themselves
2) other state and city governments will dump homeless on San Francisco as a cheap way to "solve" the problem in their city.
Take away the stigma of the homeless and ask, if any regular normal person, drop them in SF with 57K, can they live?
Or would they become homeless too?
Because it is expensive.
Think about what they’re claiming and how it would change if they were more successful - e.g. if by some breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the number of homeless people in half —- their cost/person would look much worse…
Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes? How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from your locker at the shelter for the second time that month?
Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.
Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.
I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.
You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.
> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach
Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.
Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.
Not any more than the original. But yeah, I agree it’s insane to reduce the whole crime problem to just those two variables.
It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.
At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.
Sorry for the rant.
But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.
This is a cultural thing that is harder to change - but it does not result in this.
I live in Finland and the only reason someone is actually homeless here is because they refuse to take the aid that's given to them.
I can assure you, that no one who doesn't have severe mental issues WANT to live on social wellfare.
At the end of the day, they would in fact rather live on the street doing dope rather than live in a (paid for) motel room (or even apartment) and work a job.
There are a lot of people in America who want to live on social welfare.
I don't think this is something you can change intentionally without extreme and politically unviable interventions.
I do think in the US there could be much more multi-generational trauma from our cold heartless system. Honestly some people are owed a lifetime of relaxation.
And most people can't get enough stimulation just from social media or TV, so given infinite leisure time, a lot of them are going to go stir-crazy and want to do _something_.
Look at all the elderly people who are constantly craving _some_ stimulus in their lives.
People think that the natural state of others if given no challenge in their lives is indolence, but having met a number of people looking for social safety nets, most of them just want the ability to get out of the pit they're in...and even the ones who think they want to just not care forever, everyone I've ever met who ended up in situations like that, had to find _something_ to stimulate themselves, sometimes including developing crippling addictions to feel _something_ for a moment.
The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000, about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of $27K.
Obviously this has some problems, in that at least some of the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody who's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's spending.
TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end.
(If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
Could you please provide some links to those figures? The last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as shockingly high. But things might have changed.
[1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522/umfra...
Amsterdam has basically the same population as San Francisco (~820K) but 10K homeless people as opposed to 7K.
Berlin is of course much larger (3.6m), but is literally called "the capital of homelessness" in NGO circles because the homeless population is so absurdly large, 10K rough sleepers (which is the only population the city bothers to count) and another 30K homeless by the US definition.
I live in Berlin and this is highly misleading. Amsterdam and Berlin are major drug centers and people move specifically for the supply and public services. Half of the Berlin homeless are from Eastern Europe and moved here for this reason. Other areas make up most of the rest. The number of homeless Germans in Berlin is very low. This has been widely reported and confirmed by recent census and interviews. The expenditures also include refugee (unplaced or unhoused) spending for people from Ukraine, Syria, and many other areas. Here are the real numbers: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...