Medicine Hat becomes the first city in Canada to eliminate homelessness
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
This sort of "crab mentality" makes even discussing things like basic income, minimum wage, or projects like this so difficult, let alone implementing them. People come to believe they deserve their position in life when so much of it is due to advantages/disadvantages outside their control: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsen...
> The rich players are determined randomly by coin toss, the game rigged so they cannot lose. And yet, says Piff, despite their presumably liberal bent going in, [w]hen we asked them afterwards, how much do you feel like you deserved to win the game? The rich people felt entitled. They felt like they deserved to win the game. And that’s a really incredible insight into what the mind does to make sense of advantage or disadvantage.
Successful people believe they deserve to be successful and they believe that unsuccessful people must have acted in a way to deserve it, because attributing your success and their destitution to factors outside anyone's control is scary and difficult.
> I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around.
Unfortunately, he ends with However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense. Silly me, I thought the change of mind was about empathy.
Slavery went away for farming and balancing reasons, child labour for productivity reasons and working women came for demand reasons (e.g. war).
Enlightened self-interest that results in action is worth any amount of empathy that doesn't.
It's important that it's economic.
If I work my median job, and live my median lifestyle, and I observe that people who don't work are getting more than I am, that's very challenging. I immediately feel resentful about the fact that I had to work for this when others didn't.
It makes it seem like the economic system is broken and unfair. As soon as that happens, there's no chance you will feel empathy to those people who are benefiting more.
Recognising that the economics is OK is therefore very important - it allows you to start to have empathy.
I already feel this to a shameful degree in regard to wealthy scions like the Walton kids, or children of mega hollywood stars. The economic system is broken and unfair.
Unfortunately the way to fix this is not by giving you the wealth of the Waltons.
It's by bringing everyone else up to the level of personal security that you already have.
It's up to us to use the events around us as tools to shape reality and the future into patterns of events that we want. While we cannot influence all cosmic events related to ourselves and others, we can still influence some.
My guess would be that the "formerly homeless" of Medicine Hat, appreciate the "roof over their head", much more than any amount of "empathy"
Does it do the same to women?
There are bias that we all suffer when we are poor and when we are rich: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865583328/Does-money-corr...
This is not a moral fault of the rich in the same way that it's not a moral fault of the poor. Only if we go beyond this confrontational mindset we can learn something.
As Ortega y Gasset put it: I am I and my circumstance
Quite a flip in mentality!
There might be a lot of luck in being born rich, and usually a lot of misfortune in being homeless, but there's also a lot of work and effort that goes into being just about solvent but not able to afford granite worktops, and its actually often people in those positions that are most inclined to gripe at perceived profligacy. Whilst few of them would be keen to have to deal with the difficulties of the average [ex]homeless person, particularly for something as trivial as granite worktops, it's also a little hard to blithely dismiss them as overly privileged.
As for what you said, I don't think it's useful it put everything in camps of "lucky" and "unlucky." It assumes that there's nothing an individual can do himself to improve or worsen his station. In the USA and Canada, of all places, that's manifestly untrue. While rags to riches stories are rare, poor to upper middle class stories are extremely common, especially in tech.
Can you explain what's dumb about a statement like this?
> People come to believe they deserve their position in life when so much of it is due to advantages/disadvantages outside their control
I read through that entire article. I don't think it's as a cut & dried as they make it out to be. For example, they do not define 'deserved' - do people say they feel they "deserved to win" because they committed to playing well even though they didn't need to, given their advantages? Is it fair to dismiss somebody's high self-esteem just because luck was a necessary component of it - thereby discounting the fact that hard work was also a necessary component? This is no different, to me, from a team winning a sports game and teasing the losers. Maybe the researchers thought of that, maybe they didn't, but the author didn't address it and it's crucial.
It also implies a false dichotomy. It seems to imply people become assholes as they become richer. Perhaps we're all naturally assholes and being poor makes us more aware of our dependence on others because the costs of being an asshole and isolating oneself is too high for poor people. It assumes that being "way more generous, way more charitable, way more likely to offer help to another person" to always be a good idea but neglects to ask why, when our brains are given the option to be less generous, less charitable, less helpful, our brains take it?
> attributing your success and their destitution to factors outside anyone's control is scary and difficult.
I don't understand this. I don't deny being fortunate. It's precisely because I'm aware of that, and the role of chance in life, that I don't follow this argument. I live in one of the most unequal societies in the world. Roughly 25-40% unemployment, depending who you ask. The number of 0-4 year olds currently is twice that of the active tax payer base. I already pay ~35% tax, aside from 14% value added tax on products and services. Am I bad because I don't want to share more of my good fortune? I couldn't be where I am without ridiculous amounts of luck - but I also do work hard. Don't I "deserve" a happy and safe life, if I have the opportunity? Why do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?
The economics of my society simply don't forecast very well compared to other societies. Am I a bad person because I save money and find ways to escape to countries with greater equality? I think I'm being quite rational, but it feels like the articles I'm reading here are saying I should feel bad for not wanting to help others more. Sometimes I think things are beyond help, and you need to put yourself first.
I don't think that anyone said that you shouldn't put yourself first. I think the bigger point, and the success story from the article, is that sometimes it's actually economically beneficial (to those who pay taxes) for the government to take the apparently more expensive step of giving homeless more permanent housing solutions. If the tax rate stays the same and the ways that the money can be spent can be improved , e.g. $20k on permanent housing per homeless person rather than $100k per person on the street, why not do it?
Perhaps I'm too far removed from the target audience of the article because I still don't understand the granite countertops comment. Where I live there are people waiting for houses for more than 20 years after being promised. I went to help dig trenches once as part of a corporate donation. The stories you hear are heartbreaking. Granite countertops vs normal countertops, in countries with serious inequality is actually a real thing and can mean the difference between somebody waiting another year for a house, and getting one today.
The guy's comment was a perfectly valid criticism - shaving 0.1% on a budget may sound like nothing to privileged people, but in a country where 10 million people don't have homes it actually does mean something to 10 thousand people.
I would say that with the acknowledgment and understanding of how your circumstances brought you to where you are in life comes another component: how you react to that awareness.
If you can see how you benefit from the disparity and injustice, and that something can be done about it, yet you willingly choose comfort and the possibility of lower taxes, the judgment is cast on you.
Your happiness, safety, enjoyment and advancement in life is not mutually exclusive with ensuring society provides a sufficient safety net.
Success in life is an incredibly complex game, maybe the most complex game. There are strategies one can follow and build upon to up their chances of success in life, and hypothetically if one were omniscient so that they could understand all of the random variables then they could judge whether somebody else "deserved their lot in life". If the player made all the best strategic moves given his input, and he also reaped those rewards, then he truly deserved his lot in life. If he didn't reap the rewards, then it's obvious he didn't deserve his lot. This is apposed to a purely stochastic game in which the omniscient individual would only be able to determine that the game's outcome had nothing at all to do with the player's moves.
In a hostile game in which other players are neck to neck with you(like the government and the capitalist elite in our corrupt game), you still have free will, it's just that exercising it in the most precisely strategic ways has become very, very valuable.
Even for myself, I used to do grunt work in a factory. Now I work from home at a cushy software job thanks to things I obtained here. Maybe I won't ever make billions, or become the next Elon Musk, but I'm happy enough just to celebrate my own successes and work to improve my own lot in life.
I'm sure there are literal lapdogs endowed with more net worth and power than I have by their owners.
edit: I should clarify that wealth is not correlated with gene quality or fitness, but it may follow familial/social/emotional connections of the wealthy that seem to point to a "good lineage". Case in point: royal families
Inheritance, assuming the families have on average more than one child in each generation and the split is even, dilutes a family's fortunes over time. It would be correct to point out that the rules of some dynasties take this into account (head vs. branch families) and prevent this.
The better metric would be correlating someone's socio-economic class at birth with deltas in wealth later in life. I'd be very surprised to find a radically different conclusion, but at the least it'll give us more actionable data. After all, trying to eradicate advantages-by-birth might be the most futile exercise in human history but maybe we can adjust for them as we grow to learn more about the statistical relationship.
A 100% inheritance tax would be nigh-impossible in practical terms but in abstract it would go a long way to further the end of creating a society more closely based on merit.
It's a game where each game day you get to make 4-6 choices what to do with your time. Like relax and watch TV from 7 to 10pm or take a class. Based on your choices new opportunities open up or don't. It was so in my face to see my life presented like that. Sure it's obvious but more though provking in a compressed time span.
That is not in anyway to imply that everyone has the same opportunities or that people born into poverty don't have serious hurdles that the rich don't. But, there's also a huge middle ground of people in the middle class who choose not to take advantage of the choices they have. I've done the same. I've wasted years playing games or watching TV or reading HN. I'm not judging that to be a bad choice of my life and certainly there's a balance of entertainment, relaxation and other. At the same time, at least for me, someone that grew up middle class, I can clearly look back and see all that time I could have done something that would have made me rich or at least far better off by now that I didn't do.
Totally worth it.
This is true, but misses the point. The point is that people believe they "deserve" things they've obtained through pure luck- that they've earned it- which has implications regardless of how much of the "game of life" is stochastic or random.
Why do they get granite countertops (assuming they do)? Is it impossible to build a house with linoleum countertops?
Additionally, I realized after posting my comment that not all of these houses are newly-built; so it could be an issue of what's available on the market.
I'd like to see this approach in other cities in Alberta, but there are some pretty big obstacles to overcome. Calgary, for example, presents the choice between very high property values in the core and remote suburbs that aren't very pedestrian friendly. Relocating someone from downtown to a likely site of affordable housing could mean a 30 minute drive. If most people they knew were downtown, this would cut them off pretty effectively, and that's a long way to take someone 70 times too! Perhaps situating affordable housing near a train station and giving residents free transit passes would help.
There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. The security guards working those buildings sometimes let them sleep there (the result of kicking them out on some nights is likely death), but security guards aren't the most uniformly humane and caring bunch. Some of them treat the homeless very badly. Getting these people into housing and treating them with a modicum of dignity could really help their mental state improve.
Hopefully Medicine Hat's program can prove that housing the homeless is an economically viable approach, even in bigger cities.
Great perspective, thanks for this.
(There's a guy who lives under a road bridge, not far from my flat. He's been there for years. He wants to live under that road bridge. He's obviously crazy, but he's not a danger to himself or others, and it turns out that it's not illegal for him to live there. So he's a +1 to the permanent homelessness statistics, but he's perfectly happy with this - the standard as written will never be achieved in London because of cases like this one.)
Society also can't really choose not to pay the cost. If they break stuff, it may have to be replaced. If they commit a crime, they have to be housed in prison (which is expensive). And if they require urgent medical attention, doctors won't refuse not to help them even if they can't recuperate the cost...
In San Francisco the situation is a bit different. Housing is more expensive, so 20K won't be enough, and homelessness in SF is a bit more of an economically issue, rather than a mainly psychological one.
And even if SF could save money, they would have a hard time creating such a program, for various political reasons. Also it would mean investing tons of money up front, without the cost reductions being easily visible afterwards.
This aspect was not mentioned in the article. Perhaps Medicine Hat is viewed as a less desirable place to live than, say, Vancouver, and therefore this hasn't been an issue. It's also possible that the Canadian legal system is more effective at preventing this kind of inter-provincial abuse.
The trick with San Francisco, if the city chose to try it, would be to find housing in commuting distance which is cheaper. Such housing wouldn't necessarily need to be in San Francisco, especially if these people don't have work or other ties there...
Which is to say that no, the homeless aren't likely to accept free housing in Walnut Creek. Not if their living patterns center on Van Ness.
The basic problem is that you're asking people who are extremely risk-averse to take what they will see as huge risks with lifestyle change.
By way of example, Las Vegas had a standing policy of "discharging" mental patients by giving them one-way bus tickets to California cities:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-bus...
The problem is that the cost of housing is orthogonal to those issues. People who are in homes certainly commit crimes and go through the criminal justice system. They certainly need health care. That $100k figure may go down, perhaps even tremendously, but I suspect the real financial cost comparison isn't anywhere near so great. Otherwise, everyone would already be doing it.
I hope that over time, the social sciences will get a better (data based) grip on what works and how beneficial it is, and thus more of these problems can get solved.
Britain is in the middle of a jobs miracle, attaining their highest employment levels in history. Cutting taxes on low income earners has increased the upside of joining the workforce. [1]
In my city we have youth who refuse to work the available entry-level roles and prefer to beg downtown with signs requesting beer and weed. I imagine the lifestyle would become more popular if it came with free, opulent housing further reducing the incentive to work.
[1]http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-j... (third paragraph contains figures)
For that matter, most welfare agencies, and certainly the German one with which I am most familiar, won't let them refuse such a job...
I don't fully understand this sentence:
>Most people on welfare really don't get jobs paying above the welfare limit, so it can't be that they are refusing to work, get some extra money, and higher social status because the wages are so low.
My best guess is that you may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of a welfare trap.[0]
As for the German system of forcing welfare recipients to take work when offered, I'm not sure how it would apply to these free housing initiatives. Also I believe that if the system is appropriately structured the desired behavior should be naturally emergent rather than forced.
How does the German welfare agency not allow people to refuse jobs?
In Germany, welfare payments are reduced by some amount when poeple refuse to comply. That can be things like refusing an education program or a job offer. These sanctions may not be enough to overcome psychological factors, but it is enough to rule out financial reasons for refusing.
Let's be honest here: we're talking about low paid unskilled labour. The first rung on the ladder out of welfare. Such an abundance of those positions exist that the US imports Mexicans, Canada imports Filipinos, and Germany imports Turks.
The type of solution employed in Germany is essentially forced labour. [0]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/11/germ-m11.html
And yes, then the participants have to pay to attend. They might even have illusions on their employment prospects. If they were to attend an actual physiotherapy course, things may be different. The problem with these types of programs in Germany is that they are mostly privately funded. That is a problem yet to be addressed.
People tend to attribute the "being stuck" in welfare to the welfare system itself. That may happen, I just don't see it as a significant factor. The subsidizing of low-skilled labor is a different problem, and is partly addressed by the recent minimum wage.
The US is an entirely different place. Lower unemployment, but there, even many employed workers have a much harder life and live in poorer conditions than jobless Germans. Full Healthcare, and mostly free education, for starters.
Its a small city, probably about 6th in Alberta by population. Its probably most famous for sitting right on top of a lot of natural gas, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling as having "all hell for a basement" [1].
Some other place names based on anglicization: Athabasca, Waskatenau, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Medecine Hat is not that weird. The untranslated name would be "Saamis" (SA-MUS).
One has to prove to be homeless. Have some distant relative or had income a few years ago? Too bad, not homeless.
And some people will demolish their own house. It is expensive to buy firewood, floor and walls can be used instead. House gets eventually destroyed, owner become homeless, gets new house...
But we can easily improve this first iteration, for example:
1. Let's instead give everyone an untested basic income that covers usual living expenses.
2. Let's give people who are unable to buy firewood better {financial,medical,mental health,educational} support to buy what they need instead of waiting for them demolish something more valuable.
What does this even mean? How do exceptions prove the rule?
The fact that the parent is complaining about a small number of exceptional cases proves that the system works well in the general case.
Humans prefer to work for pay, rather than get paid for no work, within reason. So do most other species. Except cats.
If we could have public housing regardless of income, people with higher income will choose to forgo it to get something better. The problems come with the perverse incentives and bureaucracy connected with proof of status and arbitrary cut-off points.
- a quick look at real estate sales/prices over the last 4 years from the local real estate board[1], doesnt look like its had any negative impacts
period | # unit sales | avg $
2014 - 1708 - 274,655
2013 - 1446 - 263,223
2012 - 1539 - 255,538
2011 - 1322 - 247,850
1] http://www.mhreb.ca/market_update
EDIT: formatting
There aren't many details listed about the program in the article, so I wonder how they prevent lower-income people from just taking the free housing instead of paying for rent.
My first question is "Where are they keeping all these people?" Previous attempts to just build enough housing for everyone[1] haven't turned out all that well, and they became cesspools of crime.
Beyond that, are the conditions in Medicine Hat such that they can be replicated everywhere? Perhaps Medicine Hat just has an abundance of housing.
And lastly, it doesn't seem clear to me that they actually have eliminated homelessness. Other news sources claim that they will eliminate homelessness "soon"[2] or that they have "almost" eliminated homelessness[3].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homeles... [3] http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...
I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
To put it another way, why are there any homeless people in Canada or the northern USA at all when they could just move to Florida where it's warm?
San Francisco and Portland both SEEM to have a problem with destination homelessness, in particular, Portland was known to have strong city services and may have led to that.
Given, the job industry there is recovering from a major source of industry, so I could be massively wrong, but it seems like the case.
Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Though I recently remember reading an article from the Slack CEO, where he justified taking a large investment round he didn't need because the VCs were not going to spend it on homelessness.
Unfortunately we still incentize the wrong things in seeking profits. Obviously, we can't call a single case out, but in the end, there's enough funding here to completely fix it if people rallied together and the Medicine Town thing could probably be done at SF or Portland level scale.
It would be crazy expensive, yes, but would also greatly improve those cities.
Isn't central SF - presumably the location that homeless people for various reasons prefer to be located in - so expensive that even software developers employed by these companies on salaries north of $100k per annum feel they're being priced out of it?
The TL's cheaper, sure, but still rather expensive.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/apa?nh=156&maxAsk=150...
Like someone like Ellison or Page or Musk builds a big tower or buys up several blocks, maybe it's not even downtown.
OTOH, people would also want to live there with other people and other root cause problems would have to be addressed for many. So you might need many of these scattered around, and would need to figure out NIMBY factors.
But yeah, the idea is someone else would need to front that bill.
There are also a lot of homeless people that moves north from Montréal.
They are quite mobile but only if there is a reason to. Good housing is a big reason and I'm sure many of them will consider moving there.
There will always be people trying to game things, even for marginal benefit.
However, in the overall hierarchy of how much I value people, I place the well-being of the people I love, and myself, above all the rest. And I'm not afraid to admit that.
If (although it's quite a big if) homeless people from other cities move to Medicine Hat, that means the problem of homelessness in other cities is reduced.
Is that a bad thing? I claim: not in any way.
Other cities should easily recognise the benefits, in that case. The federal government should be happy to pay for this and similar projects in other cities.
It seems like a bad thing for Medicine Hat, which makes it a bad thing for the future of initiatives like this.
(However, another possible scenario: some homeless people move to Medicine Hat, and Medicine Hat is still better off than it was before because it's better to have the greater numbers in houses, than the smaller number on the streets.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...
You can temporarily improve anything by getting an even larger entity or group to pay for it.
The problem is this eventually runs into issues of scale.
If this was as you claim, then an entire nation or larger region would not have to chip in to pay for a program of a small city.
That small city would just simply balance its own books and ledgers - since they are saving 100K with a 20K investment!
http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/cost_of_homelessness http://usich.gov/usich_resources/research_and_evaluation/cos... http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/...
The biggest costs are pretty concrete. They are 'after the fact' emergency services like emergency room hospital care (vs cheaper preventative care) and jail (instead of housing). It's clear that these costs are higher for the homeless than average, but that leaves the question of housing changing that for this specific group of people (e.g. maybe they are just inherently more likely to end up in an emergency room) which is a valid question.
The evidence is that people with housing are more able to get the help they need earlier (such as preventative care), and are less likely to commit crimes out of desperation, because they have housing. This leads to a much lower rate of using these expensive services, leading to a clearly lower cost to provide housing vs concrete cost of emergency services.
That's why I believe this approach is both humane and effective. This is why I believe housing first is better for everyone.
What I haven't yet seen is evidence of the impact on society at large.
What is the impact on society, and those who have worked hard for their housing, financially and psychologically? While it may make financial sense, humans are emotional creatures very sensitive to perceived fairness. In the ultimatum game, people refuse 'unfair' offers to their own detriment. [0]
Do the number of people on these services grow or shrink over time? Free housing enhances the welfare trap[1], where people may be better off not working. It is not a silver bullet and needs to be paired with appropriate policy to be effective.
Britain reduced their welfare trap by raising the first tax bracket, fired half a million government employees, and now has their highest employment rate in history.[2]
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game#Experimental_res... [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap [2]http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9475222/the-coalitions-j...