Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

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My "specific version" is the version used by government agencies, which specifically states that the government is giving people free permanent housing without requiring prerequisites.

HUD[1]:

"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."

California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:

"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."

[1] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-F... [2] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/docs/ho...

The versions used by US government agencies.

Presumably you're aware that's not the only option, as your last comment before the one above was on a thread about the Finnish approach, which has found it to be cheaper and to act as a gateway to get people other help.

The finnish approach isn’t on the same scale as the number of homeless people in the US and is hard to apply.

The classic US exceptionalism "but we're bigger" argument is almost always nonsense because you can subdivide. You're already split in 50 states. You have cities, counties. A system doesn't need to be perfectly applied everywhere at once to start to help.

Furthermore, the Finnish example shows savings per homeless, despite a far cheaper healthcare system. US savings vs. having these people cost a fortune of ER capacity would likely be far higher per homeless.

US potential savings are vastly higher.

Why US taxpayers are so consistently willing to burn taxpayer money to keep things worse when there are more efficient alternatives always confuses me.

Well we spent more time ignoring the issue. Of course we need to climb more to get out. I don't think "but it's hard" is a good mentality when it comes to solving hard problems.

It's not even "but it is hard", but the perennial excuse of "scale", as if the US isn't split in states, and cities, and counties. This comes up so often when someone don't want to acknowledge a solution that works elsewhere (everything from trains to, well, this), and ignoring that you don't need to solve the entire problem everywhere at once to make things better.

If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.

It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.

Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.

Its been a success in Canada when tried https://www.cba.org/Publications-Resources/Practice-Tools/Ta...

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