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Comment by y-curious | Hacker News Reader

I get a sense of extreme survivorship bias (in reverse) here. The failed cases of busing get much more airtime than the successes. As someone who is admittedly very sick of the homeless problem in the Bay Area, it sounds good to me. If the solution is more housing, which won't happen here due to the legislative detritus, moving people to places with more housing makes sense.

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> Smaller schemes had mixed results: Portland found that around 70% of 416 travelers were still housed three months after traveling, and of those leaving Santa Monica, 60% remained housed six months later.

I mean 60% isn't bad for the cost of a bus ticket.

At least people in the Bay Area or San Francisco live with the consequences of their own ideology. You cannot say the same about the Martha's Vineyard residents, they deported all the migrants within 72 hours. Even the people with the "in this house we believe no human is illegal" did everything in their power to get them out of there.

People in the cities also to have to live with the consequences of the ideologies of the suburbs, who don't build affordable housing, don't allow shelters, don't want to provide the resources people need, and would rather just bus them into the city (And then loudly complain about how the city is a failed cesspit).

Somehow, it falls on the ~800,000 people of a city to solve all the social and economic problems of the ~4,000,000 metro area surrounding them.

I don't know about that. The sub-urbs don't produce the same kind of urban decay. The same pattern of drug use, dealers, and petty crime for small paydays resulting in the next high. You don't have the sub-urbs legalizing shop lifting up to 900$ so that you incentivize a permanent criminal class. The sub urbs to a lesser degree and rural to a greater degree just don't have enough population density to support the same level of drug dealers and subsequent drug users. Not to say rural areas don't have drug consumption, it's just prescription drugs from a pill mill and liquor from a liquor store, not cocaine or crystal meth from a street dealer. There's not enough storefronts to steal from, and outside of cities you don't have legalized shoplifting up to a certain $ amount.

And yes, it is expensive to buy rural or sub-urban property, but it is still less expensive than Urban property, and rents are cheaper in the sub-urbs, while many rural jobs offer room and board to workers. Meaning if they get a job they will not be homeless and be able to save money.

>which won't happen here due to the legislative detritus

This is the problem then! You've identified what the actual problem is.

Identifying the problem and fixing the problem aren't the same thing. Sometimes the problem is obvious but the fix is impractical, in this case for political reasons.

Housing doesn't fix the problem of homelessness. You can give someone a free house and if they're not capable of the basics of self care, due to mental health, drug usage, etc. Then the houses get destroyed/misused, becomes a problem for neighbors, etc. There's been a plethora of housing projects, charities, programs, etc. I supported my local one then realized it was making the problem worse. These programs don't talk about the failures, just the few success stories, because they need funding, and they think its worth it if you can save a few, but its not like there aren't other effects of giving someone a house whose not going to use it to make their lives objectively better.

People have this naive notion that the solution is there and just no one has tried it. For every success story there's 9 other failures or worse unintended consequences and the waste of resources that come with it.

The only thing that seems to "work" is temporary housing for those in a drug treatment program, but even that has its high degree of failures or relapses, but at least then its not giving housing to those who aren't frankly interested in getting out of their current situation. Think about it, they've chosen the addiction, even if the consequences were job loss, addiction, etc. In other cases, its a mental illness, often exacerbated by addiction.

There are people who are "homeless" because of reasons outside their control and these programs work for them, but the majority of the homeless problem is not the people who are victim of circumstances and abuse. I support these programs because they save the 1 in 10 or whatever, until it becomes a draw for those that aren't looking for help to get out of the situation they're in and they conglomerate or stick around when bussed in.

The bussing is annoying cause my city often ends up with them, and it overwhelms the resources we have to deal with it for a city our size, but we do the same in turn.

> Housing doesn't fix the problem of homelessness

It reduces border. It is much harder to become stereotypical homeless if rental prices are lower.

If you outlaw housing space for poorer people, then they are at much higher risk of becoming hopelessly homeless.

It also doesn't help adding close to 3 million people in a year to the domestic population (not through births or official visa process), during a time of rising construction costs, and not expecting that to cause an affordability and availability crisis on the lower ends of the market. It's not a problem for wine/microbrew drinking political commentators who aren't competing for finite low skill employment opportunities and lower cost housing, but their feigned altruism has an obvious second order effect for working class.

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