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In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.

It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.

I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.

Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?

I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to hear your insights.

It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to.

Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?

“They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services.

As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.

It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.

Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.

I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.

I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also politically heated to give more funding because people are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice their mental health to avoid the issue.

I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.

Or a George Carlin fan

Definitely a Carlin fan. I don't think how he does on everything, but his way of viewing the world is valid.

IMO he went overboard on the cynicism in his later years but he was always funny.

So shipping homeless from SF to Australia and paying $100k/yr per would be a win/win?

I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...

This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.

It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.

There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with people.

This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?

The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like him from falling into homelessness in the first place.

He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place

>when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place

Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!

The whole UBI thing has always seemed absurdly naive. What do you think a junky is going to do with that money? That's a rhetorical question. I really seriously doubt having a few extra dollars in the first place is going to either slow mental illness or people picking up drugs, and frankly having a bunch of people out of work with money, for the vast majority of people in my experience, only leads to them picking up bad things like drugs in the first place. One of the most myopic views I read on sites like this, that are obviously heavily biased in their readership, is that if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.

What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.

> We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.

Ironic, isn’t it? Right back to where we started. Portugal has tried the “empathy” approach too and is now going through the slow and long process of rolling it back

We've been "foolish" enough to try UBI. Studies show that it doesn't tend to increase spend on alcohol or tobacco.

>What do you think a junky is going to do with that money?

Go to a mental institute if we tie the UBI to some basic factors. UBI isn't just some altruistic factor that gives money to everyone without condition. They at least want to make sure you're a citizen and not going to fund the destruction of society with it.

>if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.

Talking about non-homeless, it has shown to increase recreation. Not necessarily businesses, but it's nice having time to breathe when you aren't spending half your like just to make sure you can pay rent.

>What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI,

You can speculate or you can actually read studies done. Domestically and worldwide.

https://basicincome.stanford.edu/research/ubi-visualization/ is a pretty good place to start on reading studies.

> Recreation and Parks Department rangers would cite him and tell him to move

> The department’s environmental services crew...would tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his possessions.

> For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel

> She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing

> Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents, from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move his housing applications forward. Getting everything in order meant trips to various agencies — and the only way to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him: either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly balked. For him, “it was overwhelming,” Barrows recalled.

> After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing. Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his two suitcases — heavy with gear, broken electronics, and sticks and rocks he’d collected in the park — up to his fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn by rangers. “We knew that’s what it was going to take to make it happen,” Barrows said.

..and long story short, the housing he got, sucked.

So they started by trying literally everything else first, including kicking his butt out, destroying his belongings, etc and then eventually had to have someone basically personally escort him through the system, to a get a shitty room and then get yelled at by his neighbors, and you're telling me that "he was given all those things, repeatedly". You didn't read the same article I did.

Besides, this article is just ONE anecdote. The system helps most people absolutely zero--on the contrary, it's a cruel as possible to homeless people in hopes they just move on.

Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.

In my daily walk to work it's gotten far worse. Often the "problem" just moves from neighborhood to neighborhood in my experience.

Yeah I’ve seen things shift around as well. But I walk a lot in the city - all over the city. It’s better overall now than it was a few years ago.

Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last mayor that tried a real plan.

On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite.

The government can help people, but who would they rather help?

- a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing

- a brilliant student needing a scholarship

- a scientist that needs funding for important research

- a family affected by natural disasters

- a veteran with PTSD

- the guy in this article

Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it?

If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?

The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.

You are thinking US prior to 1971. You need to update your views a little bit.

The perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.

I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues. But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse. I never understood why.

My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...

A rare aha moment of mine on HN.

well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.

Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines, I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the table completely.

no, it just tends to need to be a violent offense

They can be forcibly given if committed with a judge's order.

And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>

Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap.

These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.

I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away.

We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.

Hey, that actually works really well in India:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI

Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.