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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re making up why homeless advocates don’t want to literally ship the homeless out of the city. There are a lot of reasonable objections to that plan.

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Such as?

And the very ugly optics of pushing homeless out of sight and out of mind.

Cheap places tend to come with lower job prospects and services.

It all comes down to matching each homeless person with a city that matches their prospects. If you're disabled or won't ever be able to work, you should be offered the housing and support services in the cheapest place possible since you'll be using the services the longest. If you're lesser skilled but physically/mentally able, you are matched to housing and services in a city that has job prospects that match your capacity. Only those with the most skills and capacity to be successful should get housing and support in cities where the cost of living is very high.

If you've got no prospect of sustaining yourself in a specific city because it requires competence beyond your capacity, you've got no business in that city. We should aim to help put people in circumstances where they can thrive sustainably on their own.

None of this should be compulsory. I'm only suggesting that the support being offered for free should be focused on putting people in circumstances that match each individual and that cost the least amount to those providing the resources.

ya this feels like just another symptom of expensive housing and all the roadblocks to building way more housing. Especially denser housing.

The places with denser housing in Seattle have higher incidence of open drug use, public urination, and other anti-social behaviour. While most NIMBY arguments are garbage, the fact is the city will not enforce acceptable public behaviour, and the only protection you can get is distance. I so wish I could choose to live in a dense, safe area like I could in Amsterdam, Munich, Seoul, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and so many other places.

surely there have got to be some places which have a better ratio of housing price to job prospects than seattle.

Sure, and you send them there, and then that place sends them somewhere else, and so on and so forth.

Either they wind up back where they started because East Nowhere, North Dakota wants them gone too, or you wind up with concentrations of homeless people in an area with minimal tax base and horrific conditions as a result.

Most of the homeless are already not working anyway. There are exceptions, but that's not the majority.

The homeless can be classified into two groups: temporary and chronic. In any given year, temporary is about 80% of the homeless. We have a okay track record at helping the temporarily homeless, and lower housing costs would make it both less prevalent and cheaper to address.

However, the chronically homeless, at ~20% of the population, take up over 50% of the budget. They aren't able to live independently, regardless of any reasonable cost of living. They're also the most visible group.

We should keep in mind that the solutions for the two are vastly different.

This seems pretty good: http://www.evidenceonhomelessness.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

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