California fails to track its homelessness spending or results, a new audit says
calmatters.org
calmatters.org
The relationship with taxpayers seems to be one of a roadside beggar (aka help me or feel bad), rather than a client/service (something for something), eh?
Thus there's nothing inherently nefarious, and the people in government might even have a good idea of how to do it more efficiently, but their choices are: 1) get nothing passed or 2) get something inefficient with handouts(or incentives depending on your view) to those groups that help pass it.
I'd like to see more ballot initiatives with a focus on efficiency. Run them alongside the similar initiative with all the handouts and see which voters choose when actually given the choice.
If someone’s paycheck depends on them not noticing a particular problem (like things not working, or a possible metric that could be used but that would result in funding problems), then the people that still notice that problem will tend to no longer have paycheck eh?
Self correcting problem.
That the non profits are doing PR/publicity to guilt trip the public into giving out money is just good business/survival. As long as they aren’t getting too aggressive anyway.
Nefarious, in my mind, would be something like someone going out and setting peoples houses on fire (or starting riots) to make more ‘customers’, or sabotaging their job interviews to keep them locked in the system.
Ultimately, the voters are the ones who have to decide what they want. Are they okay continuing to give money to the same ‘beggar’ who has been camped on the side of that off-ramp for 20 years now, or do something different?
Don’t expect the beggar to like them stopping though.
Writing everyone a check just increases prices and racks up more federal debt.
The real kicker is that we simply can't test it. There have been studies trying to do a real world test, but the data is useless because they can only test a small bubble of people getting free cash in the middle of our existing system where no one else gets that same money.
That's still a failure in my opinion. If the government has to create jobs for the sole purpose of employing people then our economy failed to create enough demand for real jobs and people failed to create demand for their own labor independently.
Money has to seem scarce and earning it needs to be by doing things we consider work. Without both, most people would likely realize that our monetary system is one big game rigged against them.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/oregon-ha...
1) The amount spent on homelessness in California 2) The number of homeless in California
you will realize that both charts could represent a fast growing SAAS business. One for revenue and the other for users. The people working in the government sector known as the homeless industrial complex have incentive to keep the charts going in that direction.
However the concept of a homeless industrial complex has essentially been pushed and overblown by right wing think tanks with significantly worse solutions.
The thing to realize here is that these groups would rather have a large, unsolvable problem they can constantly try to ‘fix’ at great expense, than actually resolve a real problem.
The key to tackling the housing crisis is to build more housing, particularly high-density housing. And to do that, zoning laws must be deregulated and liberalized, if not outright abolished in some instances.
But of course, the activists will never agree to that because it's a market-centered reform and because they are rich NIMBYs. More housing will mean the properties they own will decrease in value. The scarce housing supply and the continued existence of the homelessness problem is great for their own wallet.
Most people on the streets aren't capable of maintaining a house, mostly thanks to drug use, with mental illness as a smaller-but-still-significant secondary cause.
Fixing this would also put a bunch of activists out of a job, would remove a lot of cover for state-sponsored domestic terror activities, and would require harsh measures that are total non-starters.
Ergo, nothing is going to change on this front until either powerful interests want it to change, or until there is some sort of mass event that kills off a substantial fraction of the population.
What kind of "harsh measures" would you propose to solve the homelessness crisis?
I think you are generalizing "activists" too much.
That's on purpose. The vast majority of unsheltered homeless are now drug addicts and/or have serious mental health issues, and there's simply no way this can be fixed without harsh unpopular ("you want to hurt poors!") measures.
But hey, drug overdoses provide a glut of kidneys and occasional hearts and lungs for transplantation: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/health/drug-overdoses-organ-t...
It's a trainwreck.
>In this study we use clinical service records from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health to estimate 20% of individuals participating in Street Outreach services had a clinical diagnosis of serious mental illness within the previous twelve years.
Alternatively if you simply imagine that any and every counted incident of any mental health issue as being serious to the point of calling for mysterious unpopular “hurt the poors” policy, you do not even need a pdf to back that up. You can simply believe it in your heart like a matter of faith
??? Page 5 of the PDF, the graph near the bottom right of the page: "Mental health conditions: 78% of unsheltered homeless, substance abuse conditions: 75% of unsheltered homeless".
I believe, this qualifies as "vast majority". And these are from before the fentanyl epidemic.
> You can simply believe it in your heart like a matter of faith
Quite clearly, you can't even read a PDF file with the executive summary.
People that live in houses can have mild anxiety or treatable depression, people that do not all have schizoaffective disorder and capgras syndrome.
I agree on a skill disparity between us here. You have surpassed me by not only being able to read what is in the PDF, you are able to read things that aren’t in the PDF. For example on page 2 it says that stable housing is essential for ending homelessness and you have been able to extract additional meaning to conclude that it supports “harsh unpopular ‘hurt the poors’” policies.
Of course someone could simply begin with being in favor of harsh, unpopular “hurt the poors” measures and then work backwards and read validation of that where there is none. That is fine! There is nothing wrong with having beliefs, it is part of the human condition.
It is not uncommon to see a homeless person simply feel that life has not been harsh enough for them. There is no need to try to justify that feeling or invent a rationale in an attempt to enroll others into it, as this entire response is at its core disconnected from reason. The richness of the interiority of the human experience knows no bounds!
Yes, and the union between them and the drug addicts is around 80%. Still qualifies for the "vast majority" characteristic.
> For example on page 2 it says that stable housing is essential for ending homelessness
What else can they say: "We need mandatory treatment"? Yeah, sure.
I can quote you another example. Utah's "housing first" has 75%+ failure rate, most of people who were simply given housing, return to homelessness within 2 years.
Sigh. I can talk about KCRHA (King County Regional Homeless Authority) for a while. It had crossed the line between "incompetent" and "malicious" long ago.
> What solutions are you proposing to help people with mental health issues that are untenable?
Mandatory treatment.
Medically, what would mandatory treatment look like?
Ignoring the outcome of putting drug addicts together in housing without any rules. It becomes a magnet for drug dealers within milliseconds, ensuring that if you are not addicted to drugs, you WILL be pretty soon.
> Medically, what would mandatory treatment look like?
Locked facilities that provide medication-assisted withdrawal, and then attempt rehabilitation therapy.
This is kinda intractable. It's tough for someone without housing to be a productive member of society. It's tough for an addict to get or maintain housing. It's tough to get sober. It's tough^2 to get sober on the streets.
If our goal is to encourage sobriety, I don't think the solution is locking people up. "Physical" withdrawals are short and relatively easy to deal with, it's the other baggage that needs to be dealt with.
That's why we need locked mandatory rehabs. That don't give any choice to addicts.
> If our goal is to encourage sobriety, I don't think the solution is locking people up.
I don't care at all what people smoke, and I don't think that a sober society should be a goal (FWIW, I'm a teetotaler).
It's the particular drugs that are problematic. You just can't live in a society if you're on fentanyl+meth. They are even worse than opium or heroin.
> "Physical" withdrawals are short and relatively easy to deal with, it's the other baggage that needs to be dealt with.
Sigh. No. Fentanyl is worse than heroin for withdrawals. Even medically assisted withdrawals are deeply uncomfortable.
But that's far from the worst part, fentanyl (especially when used with meth) rewires the brain, so normal activities just stop being pleasurable and/or even trigger the drug craving. And it can take years to return to normal. That's why the success rate for fentanyl/meth treatment is something around 5%.
Substitution therapy (suboxone/methadone) is also not particularly effective. Canada even tried to give addicts medical-grade prescription opioids ("Safer Opioid Supply" program in BC), and addicts were selling them on the streets to get money to buy fentanyl.
It's really, really bleak.
After that, mandatory drug tests for a couple of years.
For people, who complete the rehab and demonstrate minimal capability: subsidized housing.
* National problem scope needs National solution
* Mental Health Institutions (need to be audited, but need to return)
* Non-secular drug rehab and prevention
* Jobs programs for those without
* Workforce training for those that want it
* Society integration programs, to help people 'get in'
* Treating the unhoused as humans, with human rights
Maybe those people could get help if some major movie or TV drama setup kidnapping anyone on the street for crimes and followed what happened to them in a setting that wasn't the suck IRL is.
Not really. It's now super-reductive, with basically two major causes that keep people getting into unsheltered homelessness: drugs and mental health issues.
Any plan to combat homelessness must tackle these two issues. Now try my local homelessness graft agency's website: https://kcrha.org/data-overview/ and look for their approach to mental health and drug abuse.
> Some of the unhoused are anarchists who'd prefer to be untracked so they can commit crimes; I've seen that on the local news way too often.
They are basically a rounding error at this point.
"However those are extreme cases that got regional news coverage."
Yes, they're a topic of sensationalism that helps to direct public anger at the groups rather than more systemic solutions which would help the victims and expose the criminals.