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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?

Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless.

The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.

The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.

The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.

You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.

I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?

There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later.

Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

$10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore.

The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time.

If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!

> $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore.

But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed.

And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.

That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it.

> And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum

Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.

The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.

how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?

Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.

This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.

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