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Comment by wehadfun | Hacker News Reader

Just to build homes for the homeless. Provide food, water, soap, security. It can't be much more expensive then the millions the government wastes on other things.

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Not quite that simple. Homeless shelters, per resident-wise, are much more expensive to run than an equivalent place housing, well, people like us.

Some homeless people avoid shelters even if there are space because they are frequently giant nests of disease and violence. Besides catching some rather unpleasant diseases and pests, your odds of getting stabbed increase dramatically.

So you'd have to pay for hygiene, health, and security expenses well above and beyond the norm. And that's just if you want to pursue the "containment" side of housing the chronically homeless.

If you want to pursue the "rehabilitation" side it gets even crazier. A large portion of the population suffer from severe mental health problems that prevent them from any meaningful integration into mainstream society, and mental health care ain't cheap.

That said I do believe it should be done, but it isn't "oh yeah just levy a tiny tax" territory.

Give the homeless homes.

Homes with lock, bathroom, AC/Heat, kitchen, bedroom, living/dining area, and food.

I predict 50-70% of the issues disease and violence would go away if they had homes and not shelters.

A security,sanitation crew could probably bring this disease and violence down even further.

I wish it were this simple. Having witnessed two different relatives go through the cycle of homelessness, addiction, and other assorted legal and health problems I can only say that it isn't at all straightforward. I'm not saying that the homeless deserve to be homeless - but there is often a long history of many friends and family members attempting to help to no positive effect. The folks at "Hotel 22" have no lack of truly tragic stories, but the unfortunate truth is that only a subset of them can really be helped, at least helped in a way that we technocrats standing on the street corner with our touch-sensitive radio-linked supercomputers and $6 coffees can be comfortable with. More unfortunate is that those who can be helped look the same as those who can't (to "our" eyes), and including the latter in any blanket scheme to alleviate the suffering of the former can actually exacerbate it - see the history of public housing.

I don't think there is any architecture that coders or startups can bring to help this problem overall. I would suggest private charity and learning to identify those who need and truly want help in your personal spheres to be a greater benefit than concocting a grand plan to save everyone.

Maybe the word give is the trouble. By 'give the homeless a home' - Provided a safe comfortable home for people that do not have one for FREE.

That's what people thought when they first built the projects.

They did that for one of the migratory groups in Europe (Irish Travelers, Roma...don't remember which one it was). The result was that the houses were found abandoned, but with the copper wire stripped out.

I fail to understand why providing someone a comfortable, safe home to live does NOT fix the problem of people using hotel 22

It solves the immediate problem, but doesn't come anywhere near actually solving the reason why people end up using hotel 22. To do so means doing things like destigmatizing mental health issues so that people are willing to get help before the problems spiral out of control.

You also need to work on outreach -- letting people on the streets know that there is a place they can go to get help. Social services departments tend to not be nearly explicit enough in helping get people to the right sorts of help they need; additionally, a lot of social workers are overworked and underpaid, which leads to a good amount of burnout which further exacerbates the problem.

Saying we need more housing shows a misunderstanding as to why this problem exists. There are a lot of things that need to be done before, and concurrent with, housing in order to fix this problem. Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.

>Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.

no, what you end up with is homeless people having a chance to sleep under the roof whenever they want and for whatever long they want (why shelters kick people out on the street every morning? At least why not provide the homeless with a fixed guaranteed bed every night and a locker to keep her/his stuff?)

And there are programs like that, focusing on getting people housed first, as people finally realize that this could be more helpful than shelters, etc.:

http://santacruz.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/t...

Linked from that article: http://www.unitedwayla.org/home-for-good/

Most long term homeless Americans are severely mentally ill. That makes them eligible for Supplemental Security Income ($950/month), Section 8 (subsidized housing), Medicaid (free health care), and a variety of local grants and subsidies.

But if they could keep their shit together well enough to navigate that system, they would probably just get a job.

plus drug and alcohol rehab, plus mental health treatment.

Plus job training. Probably some schooling too.

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