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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> No, more homeless will appear

It's not like they magically respawn or something. There are people who have studied the root cause of homelessness, and: it's housing. Sure, other factors make things worse, but there's more homelessness where housing is expensive.

Which stands to reason: when a thing is expensive, fewer people can afford it.

https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

That's why, ultimately, the biggest YIMBY win is going to be not helping out people currently homeless, but stopping the pipeline in the first place by having enough housing.

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They really do re-spawn if being homeless now means being given a nice, new, clean place to live. Why wouldn’t they?

Do you really think people with housing would become homeless in hopes of getting a new place?

I think there are a lot of people actually living with relatives and friends who would “become homeless”

No, but people are mobile, and the houseless are also people who communicate through the internet and share where assistance is available.

If free, safe lodging is available without restrictions, demand will quickly outstrip supply with folks moving from other cities (LA, Seattle, Portland, etc) to fill the available rooms. It's a $50 bus ticket, city officials will likely fund these tickets for them to get to SF to take advantage of this. SF had programs for this exact thing to get homeless out of SF [1]

1 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...

Which means every city should do this to reduce their homeless population. The "don't do it because homeless people will move from elsewhere to get this benefit" is a race to the bottom.

Housing homeless people reduces overall homelessness. If we do it enough, everyone will be housed. Part of this is lowering housing prices, another part of this is housing people who can't house themselves (for various reasons).

Giving away $300-500k condos is the race to the bottom.

There's so much evidence from research on unhoused populations and housing-first programs in the US and around the world, but you've got "why wouldn't they" on your side, so all of that evidence should probably be ignored.

What are some other examples of cases where we don't get more of what we subsidize?

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