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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

Surely it would be just as effective to pay the homeless that money directly!

It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.

Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it definitely would be that easy for most of the situational homeless. It would also help to prevent others from falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole. Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental health issues, motivates drug use, etc.

Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.

The problem is what San Francisco already experiences: it will attract more homeless from elsewhere for 2 reasons, one bad, one horrible

1) homeless will want this, and move by themselves

2) other state and city governments will dump homeless on San Francisco as a cheap way to "solve" the problem in their city.

If today you give every homeless person in SF 50k, tomorrow we'll have even more homeless because tomorrow a new batch of homeless people will come to collect their 50k.

If you are trying to expand the number of homeless, then it would work even better.

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