California isn't doing nothing.
They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working.
If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.
So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.
But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.
The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.
And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.
[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.
Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.
IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.
Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.
But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.
That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.
It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.
And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.
While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.
Out of sight, out of mind and all that.
I'll point out that this is a myth as many time as you repeat it until you cite some source to back up the assertion.
And what I cited is not my analysis, it's a reputable publication that did actual investigative journalism.