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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

So you fine them and arrest them... then what?

A bus ticket to some declining town with lots of unused houses? San Francisco did this until 2017.[1]

"A 2019 article in The New York Times reported that many bus ticket recipients were missing, unreachable, in jail, or homeless within a month after leaving San Francisco, and one out of eight returned to the city within a year.[2]"

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

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...

Put them in a (private) prison so they can do bonded labor, of course. It is the American way.

Jail?

So we're set on expending resources.

If we're going to spend the resources to incarcerate these folks, would not the resources be better spent (with much better potential RoI, no less) on assisting persons in obtaining living situations?

> we're set on expending resources

I don’t love this decision. But the endgame to homeless encampments in parks is parks being defunded and sold to developers.

What do you tell the families who scrimped, saved, and generally busted ass to be able to afford their homes?

They get to pay for other people's stuff. See how this works?

You (and the rest of the scolds in this thread) are allowed to do whatever you want with your money. A $3000/mo mortgage spread between ten (or more!) like-minded friends makes for a very affordable hobby. Get you a second house, open it up to all and sundry, and be the change you want to see in the world. No, it won't solve homelessness overnight, but it's not nothing. You'd be doing something in-line with your values, without forcing others to spend their tax-dollars on it, and you get ALL the points. If you blog/vlog/whatever about it regularly, you might get others interested and following your example. Bam - homegrown grass-roots homelessness dent, without third-party involvement.

"Congrats, still doesn't mean that a homeless person should die in a ditch on the side of the road as some form of karmic balance."

Good news, instead of spending $45K/year of your hard earned tax money to keep Homeless Joe in jail, we're going to spend $10K of your hard earned tax money to keep him housed.

You’re not going to be any happier with the circumstances of people living in enormous urban housing projects.

You should want a society where we are all rewarded for looking after each other, in the ways we are each best at. Nothing else can work.

That they were exploited, because no one should have to "bust their ass" to an exceptional level in order to afford a necessity. Also that we're going to make it up to them in some other fashion. Also pointing out that home-ownership is financially advantageous for tax purposes, so it already has been made up to them, to some degree.

nobody seems to have this concern when we provide room and board in prisons.

If they don't have compassion and understanding for someone who is at the lowest point of their life because it's "unfair" then I'm not particularly interested in talking to them.

You tell them to count their blessings every day of their lives that they:

-don't currently suffer from a debilitating mental illness that prevents them from holding down a job or an apartment,

-weren't kicked out of their home by their parents for being LGBT,

-didn't incur a financially crippling medical debt which forced them to choose between housing or their lives

Or one of the myriad other reasons why someone might become homeless through no fault of their own in late-stage American society.

There but for the grace of God go all of us.

Cost to send a person to a housing facility with high security is probably much higher than the cost to give them housing with no security.

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