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I believe that consensus is that we have all the economic capacity we need. If we can get by without helping those people, why would we?

Obviously I do not share this worldview and me myself border on homelessness for past years, but the world is a world of financial incentives and there is none big enough to do that.

Perhaps the issue then is the structure of capitalism

The terms “homeless” or “unhoused” are disingenuous and disguise the core issues of the situation and also wrongly make it seem like providing housing will solve it.

> and taxation of the wealthy

Why would this help anything? The services you describe are paid for through inflation not taxes.

"Fix housing, provide housing for the mentally ill."

This sounds so simple. So how would that work in practice?

Step 1, every mentally ill homeless person in SF gets free housing (free, because they often have no income - if you make them pay even a small rent, many will drop out).

Steps 2 to N? Homeless people from the entire rest of the world will have incentive to get free housing in SF. Even in the US proper there is enough of them to swamp the system of one city, and the city which starts with the policy first will receive a stream of outsiders, given one-way bus tickets from their original locations.

At that moment, you cannot avoid introducing barriers for newcomers, because the system is too open to exploitation. And "newcomers" include both people from afar and locals who suddenly turn up at the office and say "well, I am mentally ill and I want a free apartment".

As a country we're already trying this in NYC with the migrants. Some are given homes in shelters and others in local hotels. I believe some receive a small stipend (according to Newsweek a family of four can receive $1400).

It's not a perfect system, but it's better than leaving them homeless. Maybe it's the model we need to follow for our own homeless.

The big difference is the migrants aren't mentally ill. That's the actual issue, the bulk of homeless people have an issue that makes them much more difficult to house. Where I live we have cheap housing.

$35 a month housing projects. Then we even have loads of "Human Service Homes" or halfway houses for people that need more help. They get food, clean clothes and transportation provided daily. They even have planned outings like bowling or they get $20 to go shop at a thrift store.

Some people make it work, but the housing projects tend to have lots of drug addicts that are functional but would prefer to spend their money on drugs instead of housing but the low price point keeps them mostly off the street. Of course they frequently get too high and cause issues. The large concentration of addicts also leads to gangs being present which causes other issues. So overall it's just not a great environment.

The DHS homes are dispersed throughout the community. A high amount of drug addicts but also more mentally unstable. They frequently leave the houses, often times entering other people's property. They will cause scenes and messes in the yards, many of them are sex offender. Sometimes they wander off and can't be found. Nothing like wondering where the schizophrenic person nextdoor might pop up.

And at least once or twice a year someone gets killed or seriously injured by a halfway House resident.

Then on top of that we still have a few homeless people that are so disconnected from reality they just won't go indoors.

So to me the biggest issue is that even if you provide housing WHERE can you put it because most people simply don't want to live in close proximity to the mentally ill / drug addicts.

Many people who are addicted to drugs are self medicating for a variety of mental health issues

Everything is more straightforward if you can count on the involved person to take care of their own interests.

Once you cannot, which is quite characteristic of some mental diseases, the entire system becomes a lot more complicated.

At least in the more immediate term, I think housing should be provided somewhere affordable (you might need to go 100-200 miles east realistically)

But actually I'll go a step further and say everyone should have access to housing. Don't make it glamorous. People will choose to work to have a nicer quality of life.

Aligning the state against capital might actually result in meaningful changes. The government can increase their holdings of property and develop subsistence housing on it. Right now a big problem is also that there isn't enough housing.

I think this would need to be implemented at the federal level to avoid the issues you're talking about. Also, at least at the start, people shouldn't be able to move to new cities and receive free housing. Instead they should be limited to free housing in a place nearby where they've been living, or the option to move somewhere that the federal government is able to provide an adequate housing supply.

Basic housing shouldn't be seen as a 'luxury'.

"But actually I'll go a step further and say everyone should have access to housing."

The hidden catch is "everywhere?". Because the most salient parameter of housing is its location.

Taken globally, perhaps 100 million people would gladly move into, say, NYC or London if housing there was very affordable.

Of course, they wouldn't fit there.

... you did read the rest of my comment right?

Government housing in America is traditionally known as the Projects. They tend to breed crime. We’ve done this before - what would be different this time?

The projects have a hard maximum income which is close to poverty. They have to breed crime because it's the only way to have a decent-ish income without being kicked out.

It didn't use to be this way, it was possible to live in the projects with a middle class income, and crime was far lower then.

Also, there was as a result a severe lack of funds for maintenance and operations because rents were no longer high enough to cover maintenance, which causes a downward spiral in maintenance and enforcement.

Why would they need to have free housing in SF? We can provide free housing say, a couple hous away. The problem with that is that many of them will have a social net in SF which they will need on their road to recovery, so we can just run school buses to and from SF/BART a couple times a day. I'm thinking of something like a cheaper, open-air mental institution with some privacy, and without people being stripped of their freedom as a rule, which would be a good guard against the abuse, and with a lower threshold such that people would be able to work for an income and to help run the facilities, and a high degree of separation between residents on the basis of stability and danger.

As far as mentally ill outsiders, you can initially restrict it to people who have some sort of history in California, and anyways many mentally ill homeless people come to California even if just for the weather.

Dealing with people who just want an appartment wouldn't be too difficult, on top of the psychiatric evaluation, you can charge for the apartments on basis of income - it would be free for homeless people, and for people making a decent SF wage, it would be more expensive than an appartment at a similar distance, with some kind of grace period for people who recently saw their income increase and were already living there. I strongly doubt that people would want to live in a village for people with extreme mental illness for a minor monetary advantage.

"on top of the psychiatric evaluation"

This is precisely what Scott Alexander addresses in the article linked quite extensively.

Things like psychiatric evaluation are, in fact, major barriers. That person has to attend some meeting at a given time, but they may not have a subway pass, they may lose their notes, or they may just be so confused by the disease that they forget / decide not to.

You cannot expect genuinely mentally ill homeless people to turn up on time in front of some panel at X:00 in a certain location. Tasks like that sound easy to us normies. Not to people who are in throes of a mental disease and, on the top, don't have any money or place to call their own. Possibly not even a phone.

You can simply host them free of charge for a couple of days until the psychiatric evaluation. In fact, we already do this, in a holding cell, and involuntarily, or in a hospital, voluntarily.

There is a very silly attitude towards progressive solutions to social problems where people act as if there are unsolved problems where there are none, and then exaggerate them to silly proportions : this is a prime example. In this case, there aren't. Scott Alexander's article is about involuntary commitment, and we are talking about voluntary institutionalization here, where the institute is specifically designed for people who aren't a threat to themselves or society (yet), as an implementation of a housing first strategy.

Voluntary institutionalization has existed for a hundred years now. It exists. It works. There is no point arguing it couldn't work, it's already here. Everything has already been figured out about the intake process and logistics. The only difference is the institution itself, and there isn't really any argument that we have something better than a housing first solution with psychiatric support, which is the subtextual conclusion of the linked article to begin with.

> Homeless people from the entire rest of the world will have incentive to get free housing in SF

How does a country with significant housing resources for homeless people, say Germany, mitigate this problem?

They dont .Munich stachus comes to mind. And it cant be fixed as russia uses human waves through allies borders aa a destabilizing agent. Its just another bomb crater.

But Germany’s homeless population per capita is much lower than that of the US, or California. Why?

Voilà! Now you have mentally ill destroying houses.