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Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill.

I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?

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> is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?

Obligation? No. A good idea? Yes. Support services are in cities, especially centers. Half of this comment page is full with "housing alone doesn't help, we need support structures for the people" - doesn't mix well with the "hey, let's just put all the undesirables on a bus and give them housing in the middle of nowhere".

Why do support services need to be located in a city? What support services cannot be offered outside of a city?

The reality is that many of the visible homeless living in the city center are addicts, and they congregate in city centers, in part, because of cheap and easy access to drugs and like-minded people. In places like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, open drug use is everywhere you look now, and the city turns a blind eye to it.

Claiming that people need to remain in this environment to recover is extremely misguided.

Density === efficiency

Efficient in what sense?

Lower cost? That doesn't seem likely in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of real-estate, construction, labor is sky high and the housing supply is extremely limited.

Helping more people? In that sense, efficiency is meaningless if it's not efficacious. And all evidence suggests that social services in places like San Francisco and Seattle are not working well, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year.

As we've also seen, housing addicts in neighborhoods where open drug use and drug dealing is tolerated is not efficient. Yet that's exactly what happens in the Tenderloin today.

It's almost too stupid to be believed.

Ultimately, yes. The fixed costs may be lower elsewhere, but so too is the served population, hence, per-person costs.

There's no way around this save by exclusion zones and forced concentration camps or prisons, each of which have their own exhorbitant externalities.

Again, per person costs don't matter if they are unsuccessful. And concentration camps? I'm not sure you know what a concentration camp is.

Indeed. If our goal us to help these folks become productive members of society (and then start paying taxes, etc.), then alienating them and housing them possibly too far away from their families, their children's schools, and suitable job opportunities seems like a bad way to achieve that.

I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive.

I think this can be problematic for several reasons:

It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify?

If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.

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